Is Fancy Feast (can) that much worse nutritionally than more expensive canned food?

Hi! Is Fancy Feast that much worse than more expensive canned food (such as Blue Wilderness), please? I'm asking for cats in general, not just diabetic cats. Thank you.

 

I've been feeding Dusty (currently in remission) and his buddy Beni (civie) FF classics since 2013 when Dusty was diagnosed. Their overall energy, their coat, their clear eyes have all improved. I'd say as long your kitty doesn't have any kidney, liver or other issues FF is fine. It's kept Dusty in remission all these years so that's worth it to me.

 

A lot of people are down on Fancy Feast as 'junk' but it's really a lot due to the pet companies 'marketing to humans'. FFeast contains 'by-products' which a lot of people 'parrot talk' repeating that that's a bad thing but they can't tell you why.

'Meat by-products' are defined by the Association of American Feed Control as: "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".

A cat that eats a mouse or a bird doesn't leave those 'by-products', they usually eat it all maybe leaving part of the bony structures such as the legs/feet, sometimes the head. So....if by-products are so bad, why does a cat choose to eat them?

My two cents...which that and $2 will buy a cup of McD's coffee...

 

My feelings exactly. The argument could even be realistically made that food with by-products is healthier for the cat and closer to their natural diet than food without.

 

When my guy eats a mouse, all that's left is the tail, maybe. He leaves behind some green slime from voles, that I always step in. Birds it will be just a beak and thirty-seven feathers that are hard to chase down. Rabbits he usually just eats the head, but sometimes the whole creature.

Otherwise, the cats here mostly eat Fancy Feasts patés. If you want to see lists of ingredients and an overall rating of their quality, browse CatFoodDB. You might or might not agree with her judgments but still worth a look.

 

Very useful feedback @Dusty Bones @Squeaky and KT (GA) @manxcat419 @Tom & Thomas! Thank you so very much. My civvies love the pate too, and its reassuring to know I'm not feeding them 'junk.' Appreciate the link to CatFoodDB too!

 

FF does contain 'artificial flavors', and even if you go with something like the classic chicken feast, they put fish in it. As far as the 'meat by-products', you do not know what kind of mammals' parts are included, so that may be concerning, if your cat is prone to allergies. I fed it to my girls when I was first transitioning them to wet because that and the Sheba Perfect Portions Pate were the only wet foods they would eat much of. I found that it caused poop issues for my girls, to the point that Willow had an anal gland rupture from not being expressed correctly (they had tiny, dark, hard poop and struggled with constipation). A lot of cats do fine on it though. It is certainly better than feeding them dry food!

 

I did intend to include in my post above that 'meat by-products' in FFeast does contain fish as does almost all of their foods. If you have one that can't eat fish at all then FFeast isn't the food to feed. There's not enough to qualify for 'feed fish 1-2 times a week' but there IS fish in it. I have one extremely allergic to even a bit of fish so can't feed him any of it.

 

Honestly, people pay a lot of money to eat that crap in restaurants these days. We call it "offal"