Is Freeze-Dried Cat Food Safe?
Recently, more and more pet parents are considering preparing raw, “human-friendly” limited ingredients or freeze-dried foods for their cats and dogs. Compared with kibble or canned food, freeze-dried cat food accounts for a much lower proportion of total cat food sales, but this category is expanding.
Because there are many cats with health risks associated with dietary malnutrition, many of which are irreversible or incurable, it is best to consult your veterinarian or licensed veterinary nutritionist when choosing an appropriate diet for your cat. Many factors are at play, including age, medical problems, or medications your cat may be taking.
What is the Difference Between Freeze-dried Cat Food and Raw Cat Food?
The main differences between unprocessed raw cat food and freeze dried cat food are as follows:
Remove moisture from raw food (freeze-drying process) to form freeze-dried food that is storage-resistant.
Freeze-dried foods are sold commercially, while unprocessed raw foods are usually made by pet parents or sold in local pet shops or butchers. This means that they have undergone no alteration to attempt to reduce bacterial or parasitic load, which may be a problem with raw feed.
Unprocessed freeze dried raw pet food may also be unregulated or nutritionally unbalanced unless the owner specifically cooperates with a certified veterinary nutritionist to ensure that his pet’s diet is nutritionally complete.
Is Freeze-dried Raw Cat Food Safe?
Feeding any kind of raw food has inherent risks, whether it is to your cat or someone in your family. Cats and people with immunodeficiency or other underlying diseases, as well as young and old people, are particularly at risk of eating raw pet food at home.
Risk of Bacteria and Parasites
The biggest problem with raw cat food is bacterial contamination. E. Coli, Listeria, and Salmonella are the most common contaminants. Certain meats also contain parasites and clostridia.
Freeze-drying does help reduce the number of pathogens in raw food, but many pathogens can survive freeze-drying, so no raw diet is truly safe, although freeze-dried commercial diets may be less contaminated than unprocessed raw food.
It is also important to note that even if food manufacturers often test for contamination of ingredients, these foods can easily be contaminated after the testing process.
Although cats may get sick from eating raw food, the biggest risk is to family members. Cats’ normal activities, such as grooming, playing, rubbing their cheeks, etc., may cause humans to come into contact with contaminated saliva, not to mention handling food, bowls, and feces, which may be contaminated.
Risk of Nutritional Deficiencies
In addition to the risk of pathogens, homemade and commercial raw foods may have real risks of nutritional imbalance.
Unless you are directly working with a certified veterinary dietitian to prepare food for your cat at home, or a pet food company directly hires a certified veterinary dietitian, there is a real risk of illness due to nutritional deficiencies or imbalance.
If you choose to feed your cat raw food, check that it is marked as a complete and balanced diet because many freeze-dried products are used as food ingredients, snacks, or fed with other foods, rather than the only source of nutrition.
Risks for Cats or People with Health Problems
If your cat has diseases such as diabetes, autoimmune diseases, or has people with weakened immunity in the family, it is not recommended that you feed your cat raw food, because in these cases, the risk of food-borne diseases is higher.
Is Freeze-dried Cat Food Better?
Although many people claim that raw food is healthier for cats and help to solve diseases, there is currently no published, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that raw food is generally better for cats than commercially cooked dry or wet cat food. health.
There is evidence that raw meat is generally more digestible than cooked meat, but it is not clear whether this benefit is worth the risk of feeding raw meat to cats.
Ranova high quality pet food is specially developed and designed for cats’ nutritional demands at various stages.
1. Daily feeding of cats: only full-price freeze-dried food can satisfy all nutritional demands.
2. Regulate malnutrition: improve diet quality, and improve various symptoms of nutritional deficiency, such as thinness, gray hair, and indigestion.
3. Rehabilitation during pregnancy or after surgery: nutritional supplement during pregnancy, rehabilitation after disease.
