You know, I like this thought a lot. Sometimes it's also important to stop listening to all our advice, too, because it's most important to listen to your cat and what you know about what that will and won't eat. And what might cause vomiting, diarrhea, gas, or other unpleasant things.When shopping for a food pretend every single bagged or canned option is packaged the same, in a plain, black bag with the ingredients, GA, and no other unnecessary information. No gimmicks, no buzz words, no advertising allowed. Your choices might actually differ if you pretend the pictures and description words aren't there!
1 bruce 1 , for example, mentioned Fancy Feast and Instinct and for our cats, given their weird stomachs, I'd much rather feed them a Fancy Feast Classic once a week than Instinct once a week, because of the vegetables. (Of course they also disliked Instinct when I tried it out on them shortly after we adopted them, another reason not to feed it!) For us, feeding is all about keeping the carbs down and the protein up so, like @MargoLane, we find that feeding a lot of raw food (plus homecooked) works best. In our case, we found that getting rid of potato got rid of room-clearing smells, not to mention vomit, so no potato (it's ubiquitous!) is a huge limiting factor on foods. Many of our cats have those limiting factors, which seem to me ot be the most important piece of this.