Vitamin supplementation

do you supplement? if so, what do you guys add and in what amount? and do you add it to the recipe (if you make them in advance & freeze them) or do you add them to each individual meal before serving?

lots of recipes online seem to talk about adding bone meal or other calcium supplement if your cat won't eat bones (like mine!) -- taurine, and vitamin B complex. even fish oil for omega 3's. but I would worry about vitamin A & D toxicity if I fed fish oil. I try to offer canned oily fish like sardines (in small amounts as a rare treat) instead, and some cat treats I have contain flaxseed (I know, a grain, okay, but the only one in my cat's diet) which is supposed to be good source of omega 3's & 6's. (btw, the treats are Catswell Vitakitty, which are also high in vitamin A & E).

I guess I'm just worried about vitamin A & D toxicity. is it common or hard to do?? my cat eats beef liver which I know contain high amounts of vitamin A in particular. what is the toxic dose for cats?

I have all of these supplements (calcium 600 mg with 400 IU vitamin D, taurine 500 mg, vitamin B complex 100 mg) -- (i'm a bit of a health food junkie myself) -- but was wondering if I should consider supplementing my cat's diet or if it would be dangerous to do that.

I may be wrong, but I believe that you should be concerned with vitamins A & D only if you're supplementing with cod liver oil. Pure salmon/sardines/mackerel oil should be fine.

And, just throwing this out there -- on a cat list I'm on, most of the raw feeders give 2 tablets of Nu-Cat multi-vitamin daily. The recommended dosage is 4 tablets, but they give half of that just to cover their bases. This supplement does contain taurine. I don't feed home-made raw, so I don't know too much about it. I did use the vitamins when I home-cooked for Tofu though.

If your well versed in raw food then you really don't need to add many supplements. Meat, fat, bones, and organs have every nutrient required by the AAFCO, for what its worth. You can use these sites to see what nutrients are in the items you add http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/ http://www.nutritiondata.com/ Both are pretty much the same just the first is a more official government site and the second is easier to understand. Some people will add a vitamin b complex for fear of commercially produced chickens, because of diet, not containing enough b vitamins. Haven't found solid info about that, only other peoples opinion. But analyzing my diet I found that I had more than enough b vitamins and in fact every other nutrient greatly exceeded the AAFCO minimum recommendation.

Vitamin A and D can be a problem in large amounts. But the maximum amounts are pretty high and IMO it would take many meals of just liver to reach those amounts. 1 tablespoon of cod oil is has about 13,600 IU's of vitamin A. Max amount of Vit A is 750,000 IU's per kilogram of food(dry matter basis). To achieve that max amount you would have to, now this is not exact but somewhat close if my math is right, add a tablespoon of cod liver oil for every 2.56 ounces of raw food (calculated using raw DMB at 25%) about 55 times. Thats alot of oil, about 27.5oz. It would take you about a month to achieve this. But you also have to take in account liver and any other organ that contains those vitamins. But still it would take a fair amount of oil

Fish oils are beneficial for cats. I agree with KatGoddess that you should try to search for another oil. With other fish oils you really won't have to worry about over supplementation of those vitamins.

Take care