Calculating calories (Europe pet food label question)

samus

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Here in Germany, often pet food will only have a recommended amount to feed per day, like X cans per kg per day. BUT there's no actual listing of calories. Is there a standard X calories per kg that the companies have to use?

Background is my cat will barely eat, and I'm trying to record every single calorie so I know how much she's undereating (so I know how much I have to force feed her). (I have a whole saga in the Cat Health section of the forum about all that.)
 
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samus

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Ok, according to the European pet food industry association, a cat's basic caloric requirements are 75-100 kcal/kg. But that's going by "metabolic weight" and if it's body weight it's something like 35-65 kcal/kg body weight for a 4 kg cat. (This doesn't really clear anything up at all....)

So if a label says:

Up to 3 kg, 160-180 g

Up to 5 kg, 250-270 g

Up to 7 kg, 330-350 g

What would I do to back calculate calories per gram food? I'm getting ranges from 0.6 to 1.8 so I know I'm not doing something right.

My math:

(5 kg cat/250 g food)*(75 kcal/1 kg cat) = 1,5 kcal/g

(5 kg cat/270 g food)*(100 kcal/1 kg cat) = 1,85 kcal/g

Mixing and matching the other caloric requirement suggestions never gets me to something where the kcal/g lines up...

Source for calorie requirement:

http://www.fediaf.org/self-regulation/nutrition/browse/2/artikel/bunnys-garden-trip/
 
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samus

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Thanks! The brands I was looking for aren't all there, but using the calorie requirement on that page to back calculate it makes a little more sense...

(The food I was trying to figure out was Activa Gold Shrimp and Beef, which is so fancy they don't even have a website.)
 

2bcat

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Looks like you're on the right track. It can be frustrating. Just like you've found, here in the US it is also common for the food manufacturers to give a wide variance of feeding suggestion based upon number of cans per day or the like, and there is no consistency with this from manufacturer to manufacturer.  Some companies do put calorie info on their packages though, and if they don't it is often possible to get the info on their web sites.  So that much is improving at least.

I can't read the German, but if the numbers on the bottom of that page, the 60/70/80 kcal/kg is body weight and per day, listed by less active, average and more active cats (just what I'm guessing based on the text), I would find those a little on the high side.  It can be tough to nail down because it really can vary a lot from animal to animal even when they are otherwise the same weight and same activity level.  But for my cats, they weigh somewhere around 3.2 to 3.4 kg, and I feed them in the vicinity of 150 kcal/day.  So that's a little less than 50 kcal/kg.  They get a few treats and such but certainly they wouldn't hit more than 50 kcal/kg in a day (which would be 160-170 kcal total). This seems to maintain their weight.  Wouldn't take much more and they would gain weight.  And I wouldn't call them inactive, more like pretty average.  They are 6 years old.
 
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samus

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Yeah, trying to figure out exactly how much she's supposed to be eating is my other challenge. Right now, if I can get her over 100 in a day I'm happy. (But I need the calorie values of the food to figure that out...) She's about 3,1 kg, hopefully hasn't lost more than that since the last visit.

I don't ever think I saw a cat food bag in the US that didn't have the calories listed, but I mainly was looking at the fancypants (real meat, no corn, etc) brands so maybe I missed the brands that didn't bother.
 
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