Home Made Diets in Today's NY Times

Articles like this pop up alot...

Note: the Ones who ARE trained in nutrition say use caution...

Interesting. I always made my own dogfood and our large breeds lived well into their teens, but I'm leery of making catfood more than once in a while.

Yeah, at some point I'm sure I'll have a raw-fed dog. . .it seems quite straightforward. But trying a raw diet for cats scares me. All that about taurine being destroyed if you mix it too hard or whatever. It just seems terribly complicated.

Nothing wrong with it if well researched, but this "processed food is bad" nonsense is a bit much.

People have been processing food since prehistory, from basic salting and drying meat, to making bread, to fermenting beer.

Supermarkets and our wide varied diet available today are thanks to advances in food processing, and while there are some processed foods that may even intentionally remove vitamins and minerals and add artificial colors, flavoring, sweeteners, and preservatives, there are quality processed organic foods and the like available, and its a heck of a lot easier and IMO safer than if I were to try and make my own lasagna from raw ingredients in my kitchen for example... creating the parmesan cheese alone might take a while, heh!

Convenience, time, cost effectiveness, and safety for those not knowledgeable enough to create a complete diet with the know-how, patience, and tools available to process their own food safely are obvious advantages.

I think there are varying degrees of extremes though, and it is a valid argument that diets consisting solely of processed food can lead to medical problems, in both people and cats. There's some good evidence to suggest a lot of the common "western diseases" we see in humans (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity) are the result of the highly processed western diet. It's not a stretch to think the same applies to the diets of other animals, especially those less-adapted to processed food than we are.

Some cats may do just fine on diets of overly-processed, corn-filled dry food, just as some people somehow do just fine eating fast food or smoking their whole lives. But that doesn't prove these diets are healthy. It just shows that some individuals are lucky. There are quite a lot that aren't. There are a lot of people who end up with one of the aforementioned diseases and it's likely diet played some role, just as there are a lot of obese housecats, and housecats with medical issues that are for some reason considered a "normal" part of cat aging when really it's likely because their nutritional needs aren't being properly met.

Having thin, fit cats on healthy species-appropriate diets has made me realize just how rarely I've actually seen a fit housecat because my cats look so strange to me. Almost all of the cats I've met have been fat. That in itself says something is probably wrong with the common housecat diet.

I don't think people need to raise their own meat, or make all their own food from scratch, just as I don't think people need to go about making their own parmesan cheese. Some can if they want and actually know how, more power too them, but I don't think that level of extreme is necessary. I do however think a lot of people, and cats, would be much healthier if more intelligent choices were made about nutrition. As you said, you can buy organic foods, you can homecook meals with storebought organic, whole produce and grass-fed meats, which is a dozen times healthier than eating preservative and additive-laden fast food or instant meals. And in the same vein, you can choose to buy your cats food that contains more of the ingredients their bodies are designed to use, and fewer (or none) of the ones that are nutritionally useless, or (most especially) harmful to them.

I know plenty of people roll their eyes at this stuff and think, "My/my friends/my family's/etc. cat is just fine on this grocery store kibble I've been feeding them their whole lives," but as a former skeptic, I can tell you that the food you give your cat really does make a difference. I had one cat with chronic health problems who is totally fine for the first time ever on her Primal (premade raw) diet, and another cat who was already pretty healthy to begin with, who is now fit, with a softer coat, where he used to be chubby. And all I did was feed them a less processed food.