Thread: USA MC Owners - what do you feed?

Originally Posted by Meredith

Everyone seems to go for Fancy Feast, but the meat content is fairly low and the by-products are high up on the list of ingredients!

Remember that canned food is mainly water. Protein content looks low because most of what is in the can is water. Here is the analysis for Fancy Feast Classic chicken:
Crude Protein (Min) 11.0%
Crude Fat (Min) 5.0%
Crude Fiber (Max) 1.5%
Moisture (Max) 78.0%
Ash (Max) 3.0%
Taurine (Min) 0.05%

Note that it is 78% water. That means that only 22% of what is in the can is not water. So protein is in fact 50% of the non-water content. I looked up chicken protein and moisture content data. Best info I found was cooked chicken breast is 30% protein and 50-60% water. So in cooked chicken breast, protein makes up 60-75% of the non-water part. So while the FF is less, the 11% figure is rather misleading. We are really talking 50% vs. 60-75% (and the latter is for chicken breast meat, which is highest in protein %). Remember that cat food also has to have all the minerals and such that cats need, while chicken breast alone does not. The minerals end up under "ash," and make up 14% of the non-water part of the FF. The other interesting thing is that the fat content of the FF is much higher than cooked chicken breast (without skin): 5/22=23% vs. about 4% [OOPS: wrote the wrong amount here, as fat is 4% of whole chicken breast so about 4/.5-4/.4 or about 8-10% of the non-water content.]

Now the Shredded Fare chicken is a bit different:

Crude Protein (Min) 14.0%
Crude Fat (Min) 2.0%
Crude Fiber (Max) 1.5%
Moisture (Max) 78.0%
Ash (Max) 3.5%
Taurine (Min) 0.05%

So here protein is 14/22 = 64% of the non-water part. This is comparable to cooked chicken breast, so definitely not low in protein. It is also only about twice the fat as in skiinless cooked chicken breast, which seems reasonable.

As for your other concern, meat by-products being "high up on the list of ingredients"...unfortunately, in the US ingredients are listed in order by weight fraction, but no data about the fraction is given. So, you could have three ingredients, A, B, and C, where A makes up 99%, and B would still be listed second even though it was <1%. So the ingredients list does not tell you how much meat by-product in in the food.

Here are the first few ingredients in two FF chicken varieties:
Classic: Chicken, chicken broth, liver, meat by-products, fish, poultry by-products,...
Fare: Poultry broth, chicken, wheat gluten, liver, meat by-products, spinach,...

As I already noted, cooked meat has around 60% water in it, but the canned food is nearly 80%, so the broth is supplying the additional water. What would the relative amounts of something with 60% water and 100% water have to be to average out to 80%? Equal of course. So the broth would have to be approximately 50% by weight of the ingredients...and yet chicken comes first in the Classic. While this is all very approximate, it is clear that the first two ingredients alone (chicken and broth) would have to make up an extremely high fraction of the ingredients, so it is simply not possible for meat by-products to be significant. With the Fare, we also see that the by-products are two steps down from wheat gluten. Just how much wheat gluten do you think it takes to make a tablespoon or so of gravy? Not much (by weight, remember). And yet the by-products are not just less than this, but also less than something else. Again, giving this some thought shows that meat by-products have to make up an extremely small fraction of these foods. I too used to be concerned about a few of the ingredients in Fancy Feast until I actually took the time to consider how much of these things could be in the foods. Once I realized it was darn little, I quit worrying. (You are of course free to worry about anything you choose!)

Of course the big question may be, is it reasonable to pay $.80 for a can of something that is almost 80% water? Of course some of the expensive brands that have less water (and thus higher protein %) have such a sticky consistency that the cats do not even seem to know how to eat them. We sometimes have to add water!