Choosing A Healthy Cat Food: Things You Need to Know

Like you, cats need a healthy food and balanced nutrition at every stage of life to thrive, but you can't just serve her a salad for dinner and call it a night. Healthy cat food options promote and enhance a kitten's growth well into adulthood. She needs to stick to a nutrient-rich food for proper development. Here's what you need to know to find the healthiest cat food for her.

Protein, Carbs, and Fat

The healthiest cat food options are those that contain the required nutrients for balanced nutrition. In addition to clean, fresh water, a cat's regular nutritional requirements for healthy living include balanced nutrition including nutrients like protein, carbs and fat - which help keep your cat's muscles, skin and coat healthy. Carbs are important to provide energy, allowing a cat to function at peak performance for extended periods of time.

The Usual Suspects

When you begin your search for a food that benefits your feline friend, you typically see the following ingredients listed on each label:

• Chicken, barley, turkey, tuna, corn and dried egg product are excellent sources of protein.
• Fish oil and soybean oil. Fats are essential in a healthy cat food, especially when storing energy.
• Ground whole grain corn. Carbs that give your furry friend the energy she needs to prance around the house after you've gone to bed.
• Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids. Found in fish oil, eggs, and flaxseed, these fats will give her a gorgeous coat of fur and smooth underlying skin.
• Calcium. This nutrient gives your cat strong, healthy bones and muscle.
• Vitamin E and C. Both of these vitamins protect your cat's cells while keeping her immune system in tiptop shape.

What to Look For

Be sure to familiarize yourself with the way cat food products are labeled. Just as it is with human food product labels, making sense of pet food labels may be confusing at first.

You'll want to pay attention to the phrasing of cat food labels. When food is advertised with one ingredient like "chicken," "tuna," "beef," or the like, the food must contain 95% of that meat per the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) guidelines explains by PetMD. Other labels will have a modifier "dinner" or "buffet", which means the meat ingredient must be at least 25%, but not more than 95% of the total weight of all the ingredients, excluding water used in processing. And any phrasing that includes the word "with", such as "with chicken," is only required to include 3% of that ingredient.

In order for a cat food to be considered accurately labeled in the US, for example, it should first adhere to a certain set of criteria determined for each state by AAFCO, which assembles volunteers from government agencies to create guidelines for pet food labeling. This group is also in charge of regulating these rules. You can look to your region's regulatory bodies to find more information about label and packaging guidelines to help you sift through your cat food options.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even the most clinical terms are easy to learn and are perfectly common to cat food. This is where AAFCO comes in again, identifying exactly what's in pet food and explaining what the unfamiliar terms mean. Taurine, for example, sounds very chemical in nature. But it's actually an amino acid found in animal-based protein sources and is essential to a cat's vision, brain, and heart function.