Meat, Vegetables, or Others?

Hello,

I just have a quick and hopefully simple question. How do cats get nutrients best? For example, calcium and magnesium. Would their digestive system absorb it better from meat or from a supplement or even a plant source? Where exactly does a cat's body absorb the most nutrients from? And do their digestive systems absorb nutrients from plants at all?

Thank you in advance.

Cats are designed to get their nutrition from meats and related products (bones, offal etc). Plants don't really add to nutrition for cats - whilst they would eat a small amount of plant matter when consuming whole prey, that matter would already have been broken down by the prey's digestive system, thereby making those nutrients available to the cat. Cats lack the necessary digestive enzymes to get nutrition from these things directly.

Supplements are fine, but are much more readily absorbed when they come from animal sources.

I hope that answers your questions

Thank you for answering.
Well, I guess it just passes right through? Kind of like fibre?

Yeah - exactly like that. My girl likes eating cat grass from time to time, and it comes out exactly as it went in....so different from my pony, for whom grass is the ideal food. Really proves how big of a difference there is between a herbivore and a carnivore digestive system

Wow, okay! I'll definitely have to buy a supplement then.

Thank you so much. [emoji]128522[/emoji]

Yes, if you're going to make cat food, you would definitely need to add nutrients. I make cooked food for our cats using a new supplement, Ezcomplete and the cats love it.

Right now, I'm going to switch them over to can food and do more research before I start making my own cat food. I don't want to make any mistakes.

I think that's a good strategy, Graceful-Lily, particularly because your cats' taste in canned food will help you figure out what kind(s) of homemade they'll eat. Knowing that our pickier cat prefers shreds and chunks in her canned food was helpful in getting them started on homemade, though I really didn't think they'd dislike the slightly ground food as much as they did! For now, anyway, I've been feeding them mostly various combinations of pork and chicken. Pork has been kind of a pleasant surprise: I always seem to find good deals on boneless pork chops at the grocery store and the cats love it. They're generally very poultry centric!

Alright, awesome! Could I mix in some raw meat as well? As a treat?

I have some PC Free From meat in the fridge.

Yes, you can. You can feed small amounts of unsupplemented meat (no more than 10% of a cat's diet) as a treat. There are also lots of commercial raw foods, complete diets, available: we feed some of those, too. It's probably about 50-60% of their diet. (One cat prefers raw food, the other prefers cooked/canned but they both eat all three kinds.)

The EZcomplete supplement, by the way, can be used with either raw or cooked meat. I use cooked for a bunch of reasons but it's good for both.

If you're looking to make your own food, check out the [thread="263751"]​[/thread] and the [thread="272287"]​[/thread]. They have a ton of balanced, complete recipes for making your own cat food, and are a great place to start. These articles may help too:-[article="31801"][/article][article="32321"][/article][article="31714"][/article][article="31997"][/article][article="32339"][/article]
Check out the Feeding and Nutrition articles for even more information :bigwink:

Alright, thank you.

Do canned foods use meat which has been given hormones and antibiotics?

That all depends on the brand. An organic food should be free of all that stuff, but apart from that your best bet is to contact the manufacturer and ask them. Sorry I can't be more help - it's simply too big a question, given the sheer number of brands on the market today.