Cat food is food intended for consumption by cats.
As with all species, cats have requirements for specific dietary nutrients, rather than ingredients. Certain nutrients, including many vitamins and amino acids, are degraded by the temperatures, pressures and chemical treatments used during manufacture, and hence must be added after manufacture to avoid nutritional deficiency. The amino acid taurine, for example, which is found within meat, is degraded during processing, so synthetic taurine is normally added afterwards. Long-term taurine deficiency resulting, for example, from feeding taurine-deficient dog food, may result in retinal degeneration, loss of vision, and cardiac damage.
Read more about Cat Food: History, Commercial Cat Food, Labeling, Energy Requirement, Nutrients and Functions, Nutrient Chart
Famous quotes containing the words cat and/or food:
“A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farmhouses.... This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)