The 95%, 25%, 3% Rules
AAFCO has provided certain other rules for "truth in advertising" in cat foods. Don't let those fancy designations such as "gourmet" or "feast" slip one past you. With these rules you'll know at least the minimum your cat is getting of the advertised ingredient.
Here are the rules:
The 95% Rule
A cat food may not be labeled simply "Chicken for Cats," or "Chicken Cat Food," unless it contains 95% or more chicken by total weight of the product.
The 25% Rule
Foods labeled "Chicken Entre," "Chicken Dinner," "Chicken Feast," or the like, must contain 25% to 95% chicken. Combinations, such as "Chicken and Beef Dinner" must contain a total of 25% to 95% of the combined meats, listed in order of quantity, and the second meat listed must comprise at least 3% of the total weight. (Imagine ordering a "steak and lobster" dinner and finding the "lobster" will barely fill a fork.)
The 3% Rule
A food labelled "Kitty Stew with Chicken" must contain 3% or more chicken. ("With" is the optimum word here.)
"Flavor"
Barely worth mentioning here, but if you see something similar to "chicken flavored," be assured that the product is unlikely to contain any chicken at all, as long as there is a "sufficiently detectable" amount of chicken flavor. Since these "flavors" may be the result of digests or by-products of the named animal, I'd avoid these if possible.
Fillers
Fillers are substances added to pet foods to take up space, often with little or no nutrional value. Most often they are wheat, corn or soy.
From Wikipedia
"In processed animal foods, a filler is an ingredient added to provide dietary fiber, bulk or some other non-nutritive pupose.
Products like corn and corncobs, feathers, soy, cottonseed hulls, peanut hulls, citrus pulp, screening, weeds, straw, and cereal by-products are often included as inexpensive fillers or low-grade fiber content.
Dietary fiber acts as a calming base for forming the stool in the colon, and it should help develop good fecal consistency, in addition to other health benefits such as reduced blood sugar uptake.
According to critics, many commercial pet foods contain fillers that have little or no nutritional value, but are added to decrease the overall cost of the food, especially when pet food manufacturers attempt to keep their pet foods at a desired price point despite rising manufacturing, marketing, shipping, and related costs. Critics allege that low-grade fiber fillers actually aggravate the intestinal walls instead of promoting health, and that carnivores such as dogs and cats are not able to successfully digest vegetable matter."
However there is something that the critics do not take into account. Animals nowadays rarely get anything but what we give them, and we consider them unable to eat their normal diet of raw animal. That means ALL of the animal: Not just the meat.
Many allergies stem from the fact that those animals eating these foods do not have the proper bacteria in their digestive tract to handle grains.
Animals in the wild that take down their own prey, will eat the organs first. These offer the highest nutritional value. Among these are the intestines. What do the majority of the animals hunted eat? Grains and grasses.
So in doing so, they unintentionally aquire the ability to successfully digest any grain.
In all my label reading of my store, not once did I see the word TRIPE! So THAT'S why some can't handle those damn grains.
Tripe!
"Green tripe refers to unwashed tripe, not suitable for humans but often used in dog food. Green tripe is so called because of its high chlorophyll content from undigested grass, however it is more often brown or grey in colour."
Cool idea eh? It stinks to all heck however...
How something has to become ORGANIC!