Meat By Product or By products of any sort in cat food...

So, I recently switched over my cat from eating basically any cat food that she enjoyed no matter what was inside of it. Now, after looking into things I've stopped buying her any wet or dry cat food that has meat-by product or any by product in her food related things like dry,wet,treats. My question is for you all is do you look out for this when it comes to your cat ? Do you just get whatever or are there brands you stick with. 

I started her on the rachael ray cat food and the Purina Beyond as they both do not have by product in them. I'd like to branch out with cat food for her. Any favorites? 

I'd rather feed by-products than a lot of veggies or rice. It's one of those things that sounds scary, but isn't once you do a little research. By-products are left over parts of animals that we in the US don't eat. Stomachs, intestines, etc... In many parts of the world, these are eaten and even a delicacy. Cats would eat these things in the wild, so I wouldn't have a problem with my cat eating them. Cats are a lot more likely to eat a rabbit's stomach than a baked potato.  

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/by-products-in-cat-food-5-facts-you-need-to-know

I don't know what specific formulas you're feeding within those brands, I just did a quick search. They may not contain by-products, but in both brands the dry foods contained a lot of peas, potatoes, rice, and other fillers. The Rachel Ray wet variety I looked at looked decent (I don't love the carrageenan, but that's a personal preference.) I didn't see any veggies in the ones I checked out which is awesome. The Purina Beyond wet had sweet potato and carrots in it, which is an automatic no for me. 

Currently just started feeding Health Extension Grain Free (NOT Holistic varieties) and I love it. No by-products, carrageenan, and the only veggie is squash which is good fiber, so I don't mine feeding it. It's also priced super well. Was previously feeding Merrick LID canned which I liked at the time but quit because the company has gotten iffy lately. 

Well the beyond has chicken with vegetables as every brand of cat food does. haha..so it's the same just actual meat. That's fine for others but for humans and animals by products are shown and proven to be bad for our bodies. However, everyone can do and eat what they want. My cat still eats chicken just not by product.

Thanks for the the reply anyway.

I like Rachael Ray Nutrish generally because my cat loves their recipes.  As for veggies, you can see that many otherwise decent brands include Sweet Potatoes and/or Rice.  In the best of all worlds I would like to avoid Sweet Potatoes, but at least Sweet Potatoes are not a grain (they certainly are starch/carbohydrate).  As long as Sweet Potato and Rice are further down the list of ingredients, I will live with them in cat food.  But most food I provide to my cat is grain free.  By the way, one of the first kibble brands I purchased was Purina Beyond 'Superfood Blend' which included Sweet Potato; she loved it.

Regarding MBP, it's a  matter of personal preference.  Edibles that a lot of U.S. consumers shun actually are eaten in various parts of the world.  I know plenty of folks who grew up in Georgia, South Carolina and other parts of the southern U.S.A.  On occasion their dinner included hog maw (stomach), pig ears, chitterlings (hog intestines, which are loved in France, by the way), beef kidneys and oxtails.  Not all at once, of course.

@Paiger8 and I have pretty much the same philosophy on cat foods: I, too, would much rather feed byproducts than carby vegetables. Since cats are carnivores, their bodies are far better able to handle meat byproducts than vegetables; vegetables with high carbohydrate levels can be particularly problemmatic. Both Paiger8 and I have cats who vomit when they eat potato, so this is a real-life issue! My cats have fairly sensitive systems so I only feed them one (raw) food that contains vegetables, and it's pretty low-carb.

Though many of the foods I feed do contain byproduct ingredients that are listed individually -- liver, heart, kidney, bone, and blood -- I don't feed any foods that list "byproducts" but that's not because of the byproducts, it's because the foods contain other ingredients that I won't feed or don't like to feed, things like carrageenan and menadione. About the only real downside I see to byproducts is that if the food contains a lot of bone, it can raise the phosphorus level of a food higher than I'd want to feed all the time. Bone, though, contains minerals that cats need and it's easy to balance a higher phosphorous food with a lower phosphorous food; I do this with our cats' raw foods. Many other byproduct ingredients contain nutrients that cats need, too.

To get at the original question, our cats' canned favorites have included Nutro Natural Choice, Tiki (their foods are very high-quality and many of their Gourmet Carnivore foods include ingredients like liver, heart, and gizzard), and Weruva Cats in the Kitchen.

TheGreyStalker said:

Regarding MBP, it's a  matter of personal preference.  Edibles that a lot of U.S. consumers shun actually are eaten in various parts of the world.  I know plenty of folks who grew up in Georgia, South Carolina and other parts of the southern U.S.A.  On occasion their dinner included hog maw (stomach), pig ears, chitterlings (hog intestines, which are loved in France, by the way), beef kidneys and oxtails.  Not all at once, of course.

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For fun: TheGreyStalker raises a good -- not to mention interesting! -- point about the popularity of "edibles"! Among other things, I remember my father eating "sweetbreads" in a fancy restaurant (and my mother shuddering because she hates the smell) and my own (always polite!) refusals of servings of beef tongue when I lived in Russia. But I've always loved chicken hearts and gizzards. Some colleagues have regaled me with many stories of being served things like the honorary first portion of monkey brain in Central Asia.

For reference, I'll also paste in the AAFCO description of byproducts below. This page (here!) also includes a description of ingredients like "meat meal," which I would not want to feed but can even pop up in rather high-cost food like Wellness CORE.

“Meat by-products is the non-rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially de-fatted low temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hoofs. It shall be suitable for use in animal feed. If it bears a name descriptive of its kind, it must correspond thereto.”

To put it another way, it is most of the parts of the animal other than the muscle tissue, including the internal organs and bones. It includes some of the parts people eat (such as livers, kidneys and tripe), but also parts that are not typically consumed by humans in the US. Some by-products, like udders and lungs are not deemed "edible" by USDA for human consumption, but they can be perfectly safe and nutritious for animals not inclined to be swayed by the unappealing nature of these parts of animals. As with "meat," unless the by-products are derived from cattle, pigs, sheep or goats, the species must be identified.