This week's tip I think will be a very insightful one for you, if you have ever seen some of the on-going debate or questions of whether or not cats should eat fruits and vegetables in their diet or eat only meat, or perhaps you have questioned this yourself, or perhaps you have never given it a second thought. However, I can assure you, in the feline nutrition realm this tends to be a rather big deal and debate.
For me, being an avid lover of whole-foods eating and life-long health enthusiast, I understood the immense health benefits of eating plants and it was never a question to me if our cats should also be eating them and reaping the health benefits. However, it wasn't until my professional training in my quest to become certified in pet nutrition did I come to fully understand the real basics of why plants are in fact a natural and important part of our furry feline's diets.
When we are speaking of our cat's health, the best thing for us to do, is to look toward what is natural to their ancestral diet, in other words, how would they eat if they were in the wild today. When we look at the cat's natural diet in the wild they hunt prey of small rodents, birds, sometimes rabbits, ducks, chickens; and they are known to eat the entire animal with the exception of the large intestine which includes the bowels. However, they do nearly always eat the small intestines which includes that animals stomach along with the contents within. When we think about the diets of these rodents, birds, etc. they are sustained on a diet of nothing but plants; grasses, berries, seeds, nuts, roots, grain, herbs, vegetables. Therefore, although this plant-matter only makes up a total of around 3-5% of the over-all natural feline diet, it is clear to see it is there, and it is clear to see this is the way nature intended their diet to be, and who are we to argue with nature.
