Question regarding grain-free food

What is the deal with grain-free? I thought it was always because of the carb content, but the foods that are grain-free are sometimes higher in carbs than then ones that are not.

I'm very... how do I say this... suspicious when it comes to putting descriptions of things out on the label as part of the name. So many times it's really just a marketing thing, and while it may not be a lie, there's not necessarily any true value to it either. This is very true with pharmaceuticals (ever looked at the ingredients in Excedrin vs Excedrin Migraine?). I also notice that it is that way with human foods as well. Something is touted as being healthy because it's organic, or natural, or whatever other happy-sounding label you want to throw on it. And turns out it's just as bad as the next thing because it's loaded with sugar (natural sugar, but sugar nonetheless). Don't get me started on things with the word "diet" on the label...

I'm also not the type to buy into something being healthy just because studies say so. Studies change they minds every couple decades or so it seems. Remember saturated fat? It used to be the devil, then suddenly it wasn't. I take these things with a grain (no pun intended) of salt now.

Anyway, sorry I went off on a tangent there, but just explaining where I'm coming from. It's so easy for someone to make a small adjustment without adding value, and then slap a few words on the label to hike up the price. So, why is grain-free good? And is a crappy grain-free better than a higher-quality non-grain-free? I am legitimately curious because most brands out there have a "grain-free" version, but when I look at it from a DMA-point of view, it doesn't seem any better than it's non-grain-free counterpart.

This is a good question! "Grain-free" on its own is good in the sense that lots of cats develop sensitivities to wheat and corn and their bodies handle meat protein better than vegetable protein anyway. But taking grains out of foods seems to have led to unintended consequences, many of them driven by pet food companies' budgets and (human) consumer preferences: food companies now use carby vegetable matter like potato, peas, and the like as fillers. They sound good and healthy to humans--oh, peas, that's great!--but, like you said, they raise the carbs in the foods. And some cats, like our Edwina, can't eat that stuff: potato makes her barf. I've noticed a few other people on the site mention that their cats have sensitivities to potato and peas, too. It doesn't seem very common but it does happen.

My main criteria for choosing foods include avoiding all starchy vegetables in all forms: potatoes, peas, sweet potato, lentils, chickpeas, you name it. I stick with only foods that are low-carb, with maximum of 10% dry matter (the Dr. Pierson recommendation), though most are lower. (The one exception: a few Soulistic chicken/pumpkin foods, though I drain most of the gravy to lower the carbs and the cats still love them.)

And it's funny what you say about fats: my mother's a retired dietitian and I remember her going to dietitian conferences in the seventies where there were nearly fisticuffs over butter v. margarine. (She was on the butter side!) These days I buy olive oil in giant jugs!

My needs are very specific, so I'm mainly looking at DMA, which is what spurred this question to begin with. I know "grain-free" denotes "healthy" but I just couldn't figure out why. I've read that cats on a diet to lose weight need high protein - these foods are not any higher in protein than the non-grain-free. Fancy Feast Flaked line is higher in protein than a lot of the grain-free. Yes, some of the grain-frees are higher in protein, but labeling something as "grain-free" just seems like a marketing ploy to me.

I am not sure when grain-free came into existence. I'm guessing around the same time as the human anti-carb movement. My cats have eaten the same dry food for decades, which is not grain-free. The brand we use though now has a "grain-free" version, that doesn't look any better than the other ones when looking at DMA. It is more expensive though.

And yes, when it comes to human food, I'm anti-fat free, anti-sugar free (although I realize this one has its place for some), anti-low calorie. When you remove one thing, you have to replace it with something else, and that "something else", in most cases, is worse than what you removed.

I am interested to see where this thread goes.  There are others out there who are more versed in the nutrition aspects of grain free (in dry and wet food).  Like you said, in wet and dry food, there are often potatoes or peas added in place of the corn or wheat--none of which are really necessary in a carnivore diet more than corn or wheat.

For my cats, the move to grain free came was a way of deleting anything they might be allergic to, as I had a cat who was throwing up in the hours after eating on a frequent basis (and at that time, my three cats were on a mainly dry food diet with a small portion of wet food each day.)  The dry foods with grains often had more ingredients that were suggested on many sites has being a cause of allergy or intolerance in some cats (wheat, soy, corn). I moved them to Blue Buffalo.  About a year ago, I had a cat who developed what appears to be IBS now, and the first suggestion in terms of diet by the vet was that the Blue Buffalo might actually be too high in fat or protein, so I transitioned to a limited ingredient dry.  I had actually already transitioned to a mostly wet food diet, since we lost a cat to renal failure a few years back, and though the jury is still out as to whether eating mostly dry contributes to that disease in a cat (she was only between 11 and 13 years old, which is not that old for a cat, too), I would do just about everything I could to prevent that happening in my cats--it was hard financially and emotionally, even though she was really good about the subcutaneous fluids and the special diet.  We really caught it too late, and she was also hyperthyroid, which we caught at the same time.  I digress.

Now, one further note, we just adopted my mom's cat, and he was constantly scratching, to the point of having red spots above both eyebrows right below the ears on both sides (you know the thin spot with less hair).  He was on SD indoor.  I felt so sorry for him.  My first thought was allergy to something in the food, since he had eaten it ever since my mom adopted him (apparently abandoned by someone who moved or he left and did not return in time to get out of the home by deadline), so he had been on it for 6 years or so.  I tried to go with just a grain-free SD, but he would not touch it.  He actually did not think wet food was food, but I used some of the techniques mentioned here and was able to transition him to wet food over a couple of weeks.  He is now on an all wet food diet (and my other cats are still getting a handful of grain-free kibble of their brand, but he won't touch it).  The scratching has totally stopped, and the red spots have healed.  It took about 2 months for them to totally clear, since I think they still itched as they healed.

With wet food, I do feel like grain in the food is sort of cheating me as a consumer, even if allergy was not an issue.  After all, by definition, wet food seems like it should be meat, especially since it costs so much more than dry by the ounce.  Your question is valid.  After all, if you have a cat that needs to watch carbs, I would say that most dry food, grain-free or not, has more carbs than canned.  Then again, you have to be careful there.  I know Weruva uses potato starch.  The charts they have out are very helpful in terms of the percentages.  Even so, I would think that any canned would have a lower percentage of carbs than any dry food in a daily portion.

Sometimes, all of the nutrition stuff is overwhelming, and we all just do the best we can for our cats given their health issues, our budgets, and what the cat will eat.

I hope others come on here with some other input and enlightenment who know much more than me! 

By the way, I am totally in agreement on how labeling can be deceptive and  how marketing can make you think things are not what they seem! At least, the FDA makes food and drug companies put the milligrams and percentages of some things on food like salt, fat, and other nutrients.

For those of you who haven't found it, this article makes interesting reading[article="31120"][/article]

I would always look for grain free food, but for me that's just a starting point. The biggest reason for excluding grains is that they're high on the list of potential allergens...though not all grains are equal in this respect.

However, as lisahe points out, they're a long way from being the only allergens. Grain free does NOT automatically equal a good food, any more than any other blanket exclusion.

While I would always feed grain free kibble, I do have a couple of wet foods in my rotation that contain a very small amount of rice. It's the one grain that I don't totally exclude - simply because I have a very fussy boy and, to me, a touch of rice in an otherwise good food that he loves isn't the end of the world.

Columbine said:

For those of you who haven't found it, this article makes interesting reading[article="31120"]Grain Free Cat Food What Does It Mean  [/article]
I would always look for grain free food, but for me that's just a starting point. The biggest reason for excluding grains is that they're high on the list of potential allergens...though not all grains are equal in this respect.

However, as @LisaHE points out, they're a long way from being the only allergens. Grain free does NOT automatically equal a good food, any more than any other blanket exclusion.

While I would always feed grain free kibble, I do have a couple of wet foods in my rotation that contain a very small amount of rice. It's the one grain that I don't totally exclude - simply because I have a very fussy boy and, to me, a touch of rice in an otherwise good food that he loves isn't the end of the world.

Click to expand...

I like that article a lot and couldn't agree more that "grain-free" is just the first thing I look at when avoiding non-meat-based protein calories, allergen potential (I see the grain ingredients as having little or no nutritional upside), and carbs. All that said, if I absolutely had to choose a grain to feed in small quantities, I'd also pick rice. 

mysterylover said:

 
By the way, I am totally in agreement on how labeling can be deceptive and  how marketing can make you think things are not what they seem!

At least, the FDA makes food and drug companies put the milligrams and percentages of some things on food like salt, fat, and other nutrients.

Click to expand...

There is so much deceptive labeling and marketing! And I completely agree with you about feeling like the filler ingredients are cheats. They are!! It makes it all the more important to really look at ingredient lists and learn about cat nutrition... something that can get pretty controversial. 

I'm very glad you were able to clear up your mother's cat's allergy by switching to wet food. Feeding ingredients that a cat can really use (rather than just, ah, poop out) can make such a huge difference for a cat's health! I think a lot of us learn that the hard way: our previous cat's vets were horribly uninformed about symptoms of cat allergies and cat nutrition. It was only when Brooksie was elderly and very sick--and there were more informative Web sites about cat nutrition and health than there were when she first started showing symptoms, in her youth--that we started figuring things out. It was too late to much a lot of difference for her (though taking grains out of her diet in her last months did ease her symptoms) but, on the bright side, at least our new cats, who are Siamese mixes with sensitive stomachs, are benefiting from what all that we learned. And the vet--we decided to take the new cats to a cat specialist vet--was glad she didn't have to give us "The Talk" about why to feed low-carb, high-protein wet foods. 

I definitely agree you need to read through the ingredient list to get the whole story on a cat food, no matter how good it sounds. Before I adopted my cat she lived in a foster home, and her foster fed her exclusively Whole Foods grain-free canned cat food, no animal by-products, no wheat, corn, or soy. Which sounds wonderful and it cost enough that it seemed like it should be extremely healthy! But she gained weight like crazy the 6 months she was there. It turns out one of the main ingredients was potato starch. Ridiculous.