Food Choices and Lifespan
As a pet owner, you are probably overwhelmed by the variety of food and dietary advice that exists in the modern-day. Considering the marketing and messaging behind the explosion of new pet food choices, you might even feel like a "bad" pet parent. Valued-priced bulk dry food is quite often frowned-upon as a "terrible" choice or even similar to poison.
While it is true that the ingredients and processing methods affect the nutritional value and potential negative side-effects of the food, the choices probably do not have a large effect on pet lifespan. From personal experience and reviewing the opinions of veterinarians, it is likely you can provide your cat with an additional year or two of healthy life by consistently feeding them a more natural high-quality food (and gain even more healthy life by spending time with them, and getting them regular health check-ups, and by helping them maintain a healthy weight).
Gin-Gin is a big fan of raw meat and organ meat.
If you have the financial resources to afford the high-quality food (or a well-balanced raw food diet you prepare at home), then by all means, go for it. If you cannot afford the high-quality food, then do the best you can. If lower quality food is what you can afford, then karma will still be on your side because you are providing a home and a meal for an otherwise lonely cat.
In the case of our cats that have passed, two of them exceeded the typical lifespan and two of them did not. (One side note is that we did not know the exact age of the two cats that died at an earlier age, but our educated guess was that they were both in the 11 to 12 year-old range). All of these cats ate primarily value-priced, heat-processed, extruded cat food/kibble. However, they did have wet food at times and relatively frequent treats of raw meat. They spent a lot of time outside eating catnip and grass and they had plenty of activity in their life. Perhaps the two cats that died at a bit younger age (Sole' and Lynx) suffered from eating poor quality dry food, but this cannot be proven. There are so many health variables throughout the typical pet life that it would be irresponsible to pin the blame on "the food". Still, 50% only reaching a normal lifespan is not our idea of success. Two of our cats reached the grand old ages of 17 and 18 respectively, and the focus of RejuveCat is to make those numbers a lot higher, with good health to boot!
Recently, we have started looking into ways of improving the diet of our cats. There are a lot of options and we have tried a couple of which will be the focus of some future blog posts and reviews. The main barrier is still cost, but with so many new pet food brands trying to break into the "high-quality" raw food marketplace, there is some hope that the economies of scale will soon help bring the price down.
Jean Paul does not eat a lot of raw food, but he is still quite healthy at 9 years of age.
I could go on about why many experts consider dry valued-priced food "lower quality", but there are already a lot of great resources and opinions out there on the web. In the following links and videos, you will find a consistent theme that heat-processing destroys a lot of the native/initial nutrients found in animal diets and that same heat-processing produces small amounts of known carcinogens.
Dr. Becker analyzes reasons why a natural diet for your cat it probably the best.
A very detailed article with many considerations about what makes a good pet food.
Some reasons why dry kibble is not considered a good option.
Overall, it is difficult to determine which is better, dry or wet food.
What can you tell about your pet food by the label.
Surprisingly, even though the diet of wild cats is nearly 100% carnivorous, there is not a lot of evidence that the few extra (non-grain) carbs or plant-based proteins found in some commercial foods are harmful. However, caution should be advised when reading the research. I am unaware if there have been any true food-based lifespan studies conducted on cats or dogs. These would be studies that followed cats and dogs throughout their life and took note of how long each lived and then compared their lifespan to their diet. It could be the case that there is little harm from non-carnivorous diets (in cats) in the short-term, such as a couple of years, but there could be noticeable effects in the long-term (whether good or bad).
Where do you fall on the dry food vs. wet food debate? Do you try to avoid carbs and grains in your cat or dog food? Leave a comment below.