What food should I feed my cat?

Original Question: My cat has problems with food. She was a stray that l adopted and she would eat and then later throw up so I started giving her raw meat. She loved and it became better and happy. Should l continue on it or not? I need some advice on how to feed this cat. All the others l feed her have problems and l know that industrialized food sometimes is not enough. Thank you. - Carla

Jan 31, 2019

Hi Carla

Thanks for your question.

It’s very difficult to recommend the best diet for your cat. In fact, I think it is near impossible because you really need to know how a cat responds to a food to know if it is good for them or not. I have always maintained that a food is good if your cat if it eats it, has good solid stools, does not become itchy, doesn’t vomit, and maintains an ideal body condition.

Any food you select has to have a trial period before knowing whether it is ideal or not. To avoid this risk, I would recommend that you introduce any new food very slowly over the course of 3 weeks. Monitor your cat’s response to it very closely as you switch over to the new diet. If diarrhea or vomiting develops, I would stop it immediately and seek medical attention if it does not resolve right away.

I would also recommend that you visit your veterinarian and have some wellness testing performed. It would be ideal to make sure there is not an underlying condition that is contributing to these symptoms. If you don’t want to address a possible medical condition because of how expensive it can be, it could be risky. Something could be occurring under the surface which could progress while you waste time trying different diets. If you are comfortable with the risk, which I don’t recommend, you could try the different diets anyways and offer something to help digestion such as probiotics.