NO!! FEEDING CATS ONLY KIBBLE IS NOT THE BEST CHOICE
Browsing online, I’ve often come across the claim: “A cat should eat only kibble because it’s complete” … Well, let’s just say that feeding a cat exclusively dry food is not ideal for several reasons. Although it has many advantages, including easy storage and a complete, balanced composition, commercial dry food is not the ideal food for cats when given as their sole source of nutrition.
CATS NEED FLUIDS
The main reason lies in the cat’s very nature: as an animal that originated in the desert, it tends to drink very rarely. However, its water requirements remain unchanged, and this is where wet food can help by providing a substantial amount of hydration without the cat even noticing. This cannot be achieved with dry food alone, which by definition contains around 8-10% moisture, thus putting cats at greater risk of urinary and kidney problems.
IT’S HARDER TO MANAGE A CAT’S WEIGHT
Another good reason to prevent health problems is the calorie content of different types of food, for the same weight and level of satiety: dry food is certainly much more concentrated and calorie-dense than wet food. Offering a variety of both types of food also allows you to vary meal sizes and avoid risks such as excess weight or even obesity and related health problems (musculoskeletal, metabolic, cardiovascular, and more).
Among the metabolic disorders associated with excess weight, diabetes is certainly one of them. Effective prevention also involves reducing carbohydrate intake, as carbohydrates are not essential for cats but are definitely found in kibble. Wet food therefore helps us get closer to a cat’s natural needs.
MIX FEEDING
By using both dry and wet food, we can often achieve the right balance between nutritional quality and convenience for the owner, who has a wide choice of sources to rotate.
This type of diet, recommended for cats, is called MIX FEEDING, meaning the possibility of mixing complete dry foods with wet food. Complete dry food provides all the necessary nutrients in a balanced way, while wet food, which may be complementary, offers benefits that dry food cannot provide:
- It provides essential fluids to the cat’s diet.
- It makes it easier to change flavors, offering an extremely important rotation of protein sources.
- If the wet food is high quality, it provides the cat with high nutritional value proteins that are essential for maintaining good health.
- Adding wet food means removing some kibble, thereby reducing the amount of carbohydrates, which are not essential for cats and are abundant in dry food.
GET THEM USED TO IT FROM KITTENHOOD
Every cat is an individual, with its own specific food preferences, not only in terms of flavors but also textures. That’s why mix feeding is a winning strategy, especially for fighting boredom and the neophobic tendency toward things the cat doesn’t know. It’s important, especially to achieve this latter goal, to start offering tastes and samples from an early age!
However, it is important to remember that mix feeding also needs to be properly balanced and not improvised. This is to avoid the risk of deficiencies or excessive buildup of certain nutrients. I always recommend asking your veterinarian to determine the right quantities and proportions of the chosen foods throughout the day.
The cat’s breed, age, weight, health status, and lifestyle are key factors to consider when selecting and portioning food for each individual patient.
Dr. Alessandra Calini
Veterinarian specializing in nutrition