Pate Canned Cat Food: The Healthiest Canned Choice?

Is it true that canned pate is better than shreds, cuts, bits, etc? Someone told me pate is (usually) the lowest in carbs. True or false? I'm a fairly new canned food feeder and all of my cats seem to prefer pate.

Usually, yes. The higher-end shredded foods like Weruva or Tiki Cat are made with actual shredded meat. But with the cheaper foods, the shreds and chunks are usually made of compressed soy protein or wheat gluten :/. Whereas the pate foods usually are made mostly of meat.

That said, some of my cats just really love the shredded Friskies and Fancy Feast so oh well :tongue2:. But if your cats prefer the pates, go ahead and stick with those! You get more calories for your money with pates too.

Willowy said:

Usually, yes. The higher-end shredded foods like Weruva or Tiki Cat are made with actual shredded meat. But with the cheaper foods, the shreds and chunks are usually made of compressed soy protein or wheat gluten :/. Whereas the pate foods usually are made mostly of meat.

That said, some of my cats just really love the shredded Friskies and Fancy Feast so oh well

. But if your cats prefer the pates, go ahead and stick with those! You get more calories for your money with pates too.

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Agreed. I stick to pates with the lower end brands like Friskies and Sheba. With shreds I stick to the Soulistic Good Karma and the Nature's Recipe chicken shreds. They also like the pate from this brand so I add it to the rotation from time to time. They usually get a pate of some kind with shreds used as a topper. 

My cats turn their noses as chunky or shredded foods. I guess they think they're too good to actually chew their food! Why chew when you can just lap it down??   So I only feed them pate food.  When wanting to try a new food, I write to the manufacturer online and ask if it's pate or chunky/shredded so I don't waste time and money buying foods my crew won't eat.

Pate is mostly all meat while canned foods that are shreds / chunkks / etc in suace or gravy tend to be mostly liquid (ie water) than actual food. So you get more food for your money by buying pates. Add water to create a "gravy" if your cat likes something to lap up.

Willowy said:

Usually, yes. The higher-end shredded foods like Weruva or Tiki Cat are made with actual shredded meat. But with the cheaper foods, the shreds and chunks are usually made of compressed soy protein or wheat gluten :/. Whereas the pate foods usually are made mostly of meat.

That said, some of my cats just really love the shredded Friskies and Fancy Feast so oh well

. But if your cats prefer the pates, go ahead and stick with those! You get more calories for your money with pates too.

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Cat foods of different "types" can differ a lot so I like Willowy's post for getting at that point! Willowy highlights points about ingredients and calories that are a good reminder of what I think is most important about pet food: the importance of reading labels and checking manufacturers' Web sites to get detailed information about foods. Researching foods using information from the companies themselves is the best thing we can all do to make informed decisions about what to feed our cats. Then, of course, our cats decide what they'll eat!

Research is important because generalizing can lead to bad assumptions. The shreds and chunks in lots of foods that aren't made from actual shreds or chunks of meat have soy, wheat, corn, potato, peas, and other ingredients that help the companies "extend" the meat ingredients. Some others, like Nutro Natural Choice, do not. Some pates--Merrick LID's recent addition of peas comes to mind--include non-meat filler ingredients, too. And though most shred foods with sauces and gravies have carby thickeners, not all do, though I wish I could think of others beyond Tiki and some Weruva foods that do not. And then there are calorie counts, which can be pretty surprising, too.

I read labels and Web sites pretty carefully, for ingredient lists and to keep track of changes: many of the foods we feed have changed in the last couple of years, some more than once!