I must admit, I have not looked into the actual ingredients of these products for some time, as I have moved onto feeding Raw food. I have just looked up the ingredients of both whiskers and felix and they too have changed their wording. They no longer specify the amount of meat in their food. However, from looking at the ingredient list, you can see that there is cereal in the food, as cats are carnivores, I see no other reason to have cereal in cat food other than to add as a cheap filler.

There are a few people on this site that are quite hot on nutritional value of cat food, so someone else may be able to shed some more light on the matter.

As for changing a cats diet, of course I would never advice against talking to a vet, however, if you have no reason to believe your cat has any sort of medical or intolerance problem, I cannot see any reason why changing a diet would be a problem, so long as you do it gradually. Especially if what you are changing them to is a better quality food.

I think the 4 % [which is clearly labelled] probably refers to the substance that we would recognise as chicken or beef meat, whilst the rest of the protein content comes from 'derivatives ' of animal or vegetable origin.

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They have labelled the quantity of meat in that flavour, but they have not labelled the quantity of meat in total. I am fairly sure this used to be specified on the packet, but it is no longer shown (maybe due to it being questioned?).

It is understandable that beef flavour cat food may not contain very much beef (just like beef flavour crisps) but you would expect cat food to be largely made of meat in general.

I wonder if it's anything to do with labelling laws? Perhaps the stuff they use to make up the protein content is not strictly allowed to be classified as 'meat'?

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Oh yes I’m sure you right, they do have to follow strict guidelines on their lists, and quite right too, if its not meat, they shouldn’t call it meat. I’m sure they find ways round it though, like when shampoo companies describe water as aqua.

Yes, the 4% is the "named" meat or fish - the rest of the protein content may be either "meat and animal derivatives" which could be all sorts of parts of the animal (!) or vegetable protein (usually gluten) - Felix certainly state that their food contains vegetable protein, which of course is useless for a carnivore like the cat.
By a simple calculation (using the percentages on the label) you can work out the carbohydrate content of the various foods - most wet foods are under 10% carbs whereas most dry foods are at least 25% and often 30-40%. A cat requires virtually zero carbs in its diet.

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This is exactly what the Campaign for Real Pet Food is all about - improving the labelling on foods so we're able to make a more informed choice.

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