Lapping it Up: The Quick & Easy Guide to Making Healthy Cat Food At Home - Brossura

O'Grady, Patricia

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1449024300 ISBN 13: 9781449024307

Casa editrice: AuthorHouse, 2009

Riassunto

LAPPING IT UP. The complete Quick & Easy Guide to Making Healthy Cat Food at Home. Learn how cats with chronic illness improved after being fed a healthy homemade diet of fresh foods. Dispel the myths that may be sabotaging your cat's health. Learn what foods you should never feed your cat. Find out what is in processed commercial cat foods, which may be making your feline sick. Learn practical cost effective solutions to feeding your cat with fresh homemade foods, using a more holistic approach for a longer, happier, and healthier life. This book contains many Quick, Easy & Healthy vet approved recipes to cook for your cat, including meals, healthy treats, cakes and even ice cream.

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Lapping it Up

The Quick & Easy Guide to Making Healthy Cat Food At HomeBy Patricia O'Grady

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Patricia O'Grady
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-2430-7

Contents

Introduction.......................................................................xvDo you know what's in your cat's food?.............................................1Pet Food Recalls...................................................................10Things you probably don't know about commercial cat food...........................14What a cat needs and doesn't need in it's diet.....................................18Meat...............................................................................19Fats...............................................................................21Carbohydrates......................................................................23Grains.............................................................................24Fiber..............................................................................25Water..............................................................................26Fish...............................................................................27Vegetables.........................................................................29Fruits.............................................................................30Eggs...............................................................................31Milk and other Dairy Products......................................................34Vitamins...........................................................................35Catnip.............................................................................36The Overweight or Diabetic Cat.....................................................40Foods Your Cat Should Never Eat....................................................44Beware of poisonous plants.........................................................47MAKING THE SWITCH..................................................................50Exercise for your cat..............................................................53RECIPES............................................................................55Jersey's Finicky Feast.............................................................56Kitty Sole Dinner..................................................................56Easy Sardine Cat Dinner............................................................57Feline Cheese and Chicken Livers Dinner............................................58Cat Beef and Oats Meow Dinner......................................................58Feline Chicken, Rice and Lentils Dinner............................................59Tabby's Chicken Hash Dinner........................................................60Pussycat Lamb with Clams...........................................................60Gourmet Creamy Feline Salmon Pasta.................................................61Meow Chicken Parmesan..............................................................61Fiesta Kitty Taco Dinner...........................................................62Feline Cornish Game Hen Dinner.....................................................62Feline Holiday Rabbit Feast........................................................63Turkey Pasta Dinner................................................................63Yummy Pussycat Trout Dinner........................................................64Liver A La Kitty...................................................................64Finicky Chicken Stew...............................................................65Feast of Beef Leftovers............................................................66Beefy Potatoes Au Feline Casserole.................................................66SPECIAL NEEDS RECIPES..............................................................68Feline Weight Loss Recipe..........................................................68Kidney & Bladder Special Needs Recipe..............................................69Low Sodium for Cats with Heart Problems or High Blood Pressure.....................71Cat Chicken Diabetic Dinner........................................................71Diabetic Kitty Diet # 2............................................................72My Cat is Allergic to Everything Diet..............................................72Restricted Protein Feline Diet.....................................................72Diabetic Kitty Treat...............................................................73Cat Treats.........................................................................74Cheese Ball Treats.................................................................75Catnip Kitty Cookies...............................................................75Crunchy Oatmeal Tuna Treats........................................................76Baby Food Treats...................................................................77Kitty Mackerel Heaven..............................................................77Tasty Tuna Ball Treats.............................................................78Easy Feline Salmon Treats..........................................................78Salmon Kitty Balls.................................................................78Kitty Honey of a Treat.............................................................79Catnip Molasses Cookies............................................................79Chicken Liver Delight Feline Cookies...............................................80Teenie Weenie Kitty Zucchini Oatmeal Treats........................................81Cats Pumpkin Oatmeal Bites.........................................................81Yummy Liver Brownies...............................................................82Precious Kitty Pumpkin Treats......................................................82Parmesan Cheese Biscuits...........................................................83Happy Birthday Kitty Carrot Cake...................................................84Banana Apple Muffins...............................................................85Feline Ice Cream Treats............................................................87Banana Cantaloupe Freeze...........................................................87Blueberry Freeze...................................................................88Peanut Butter Freeze...............................................................88

Chapter One

Do you know what's in your cat's food?

Go ahead and grab the bag, pouch or can of your feline's current food, and let's compare ingredients. Do you understand what those ingredients are? Some of the items commonly put into all the brands of commercial cat food will disgust you. Most of us like to think of ourselves as educated consumers. Sure we all read the labels on the sides of those bags, pouch's and cans. Don't we? Do we really understand what we are reading or have these company's tricked us with those television commercials showing beautiful prime cuts of beef, and fresh fish.

I'm sure that if people were truly informed about what their cats have actually been eating, most of these pet food companies would be out of the cat food business. I don't believe that anyone would willingly feed their cats something that was making them sick and in some cases, killing them. I'm going to tell you all the nasty little secrets of what's in these foods, and you're not going to like it.

The first thing you have to understand is that these companies are making the cheapest, most profitable cat food possible, with total disregard for the health and well being of your pet. They are in this business for one thing only, to make money, and that they are, pet food is big business. I know they want you to think that they really care about your cat, but the truth is ugly.

The truth is the cat food you are paying for with your hard earned money, the food your feline is eating right now, contains things like toxic chemicals, spoiled meat and waste and this is just the beginning. The sad part of this is, how these items get into your cats food in the first place and it will really surprise and shock you.

Commercial pet foods have only been around since the 1930's. They were born when cereal companies were trying to find something to do with their rejected grain, wheat's, rice, and corns that failed USDA inspection because of being moldy, rancid or had some other contaminant that wasn't safe for humans. They discovered that the meat industry was "wasting meats" that couldn't pass USDA inspection due to livestock that has been diseased. The fishing industry had some of the very same problems. They formed the moneymaking idea to mix these wastes and create a product called "pet food". They hired marketing firms to brainwash the public into believing that feeding their pets from the table, giving them human food was bad, and that their creation was the only nutritionally balanced food to give them. They created a processed artificial diet for profit, and made us believe it was the best for our pets. Sorry to tell you but we have been deceived.

Humans in the United States waste a lot of things and large corporations have figured out how get rid of all that waste, and make big bucks at doing it. We only eat the lean muscle from cows, fish, lambs and poultry. The remaining carcass is sent to a rendering plant, along with all other different kinds of waste, to be made into cat and dog food. This mixture contains, beaks, teeth, udders, lungs, intestines, heads, eye balls, blood, ligaments, tongues, chicken feet, hooves, spleens, unborn animal babies fetus's, hide, fur and more. The "meat" in those "meat by-products" in some cat foods may actually contain tumors, a "protein source" which is forbidden to human consumers, how disgusting.

If you don't like that, you really aren't going to like what I have to tell you next. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 1990 that Dog and cat food could contain the remains of dead animals such as euthanized dogs, cats and horses. Although pet food company executives and the National Renderers Association vehemently denied the report, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the FDA confirmed the story to be true, and nothing has changed since. Yes, your cat right now may be an unwilling participate in cannibalism and unknowingly be eating another cat. These rendering plants sole business is to dispose of millions of pounds of dead cats and dogs and other animals that the government deemed aren't safe for humans to eat. Their end product is then sold to pet food companies. These rendering plants get their dead cats and dogs directly from dog and cat shelters. Most of these animals have been put to sleep and arrive at the rendering plant in plastic bags; many are even wearing leather collars, and flea collars. In one large city alone, two hundred tons of euthanized animals including dogs and cats are delivered to rendering plants just in one month. If over seven million dogs and cats are killed in dog pounds each year, how many of them have ended up in pet food. Amazingly, animals from research laboratories may be rendered into pet food as well, and still some insist road kill lands in some of the batches. So how do they label this on the bag? Why of course, it's called "meat and bone meal", and then they have another clever little term "meat by products". Another interesting fact is that meat and bone meal is thought to have been a contributing factor in mad cow disease. In Europe they use meat and bone meal as a fossil-fuel replacement, and in America we are feeding it our pets. America needs to wake up and pay attention. Other countries aren't much better, and most are even worse.

Since the Mad Cow was discovered in Washington during December, 2003, the government has attempted to fix the shortcomings in the FDA testing processes, and to enact new regulations that will help protect the (human) consumer, but has done little or nothing to protect your pets. Mad Cow Disease is caused by rogue prions, the mutant proteins believed to be responsible for Feline Spongiform Encephalopathy, in which all forms of prion disease are fatal. The FDA has enacted new regulations for beef intended for human consumption, rendered meat by-products, including all those nasty things I have mentioned here, are still allowed in pet food, and those by-products could come from downer cows.

The FDA did conduct a study years ago looking for pentobarbital, which is sometimes used as a euthanasia drug, and they did find that some of the cat and dog foods tested positive for it. The ingredients that were most commonly associated with testing positive for the presence of pentobarbital were the meat and bone meal, and the added animal fat. If you give a cat a small amount of pentobarbital it will not kill him but is proven to cause seizure activity. The amazing part of this is, there are still no laws on the books to prevent these companies from doing this. Legally, pet food companies can dump just about anything they want into their next batch of cat food, and no one would be any the wiser. These laws need to change.

Let's discuss the actual meat that really goes into cat food. When cattle die, regardless from what infectious or contagious disease it suffered, their carcasses are salvaged by these pet food plants and used. These plants are not USDA inspected, but they claim that they are monitored from time to time and required by law to add charcoal to this meat, in order to keep these diseased meats out of the human food chain. In fact, this meat is labeled and stamped "unfit for human consumption". Which now by law makes it fit for cat consumption? Legally yes, with the charcoal added and all.

This meat is called 4-D meat; again let's cover this up and give it a different name, so that the public doesn't understand. What this name really means is that the cattle the meat came from were (1) Dead (2) Dying (3) Diseased (4) Down or Disabled at the time they arrived at the slaughterhouse.

Keep in mind, cattle which are sick or near death, are pumped with drugs like, procaine, penicillin, and several others in a last ditch attempt to save them, because it they arrive to the slaughter house as 4-D meat, they get less money for them, if any money at all. Therefore, all of these drugs as well as the possible infectious or contagious diseases that killed them in the first place are in the carcass after the slaughter.

These carcasses are more often than not contaminated with bacteria such as Salmonella, and Escherichia coli. Dangerous E. coli bacteria are estimated to contaminate more than 50% of meat and bone meal. These companies will argue that they cook this "meat" at 200 to 270 degrees for 20 to sometimes as long as 60 minutes, and that this cooking process kills all of these bacteria. This might be true to a certain extent, BUT it does not eliminate the endotoxins that some bacteria produce during their growth, and release when they die. These toxins can cause cats to get sick. Interestingly, the pet food companies are smart enough not to do any testing of their products for these endotoxins, most likely because they already know they will find them, and that would also be an added expense for them, which would cut down on their profits. As an additional note, when reading labels, the word "with" means that a pet food product is required to contain only 3% of the ingredient. The word "flavor" means that the pet food product is not required to have any of the ingredient in it.

The cat food companies want that cat food to have the longest shelf life they can give it; they want to make sure it can sit on a shelf in a store for around 1 year. To make the food edible (as if we could even consider it edible), fats used in pet's foods must be preserved with chemicals. Are these added chemicals safe for your cat? Not in my opinion. These companies add chemicals like BHA and BHT (which has been proven to cause liver and kidney problems. Some are adding Ethoxyquin, which is suspected of causing cancer in animals.. Ethoxyquin is made by a chemical corporation to be used as a rubber preservative. The actual containers are labeled poison, and the department of agriculture calls it a pesticide. The OSHA lists it as a hazardous chemical. These are chemicals that are all banned in Europe. So you must be wondering how these companies are legally allowed to use this? They purchase items that have these chemicals already placed in them therefore they didn't add it themselves; these companies don't have to disclose that information on the package. Propylene glycol another preservative has been known to cause destruction of red blood cells in dogs. I should note for you that propylene glycol was finally banned from cat food because it caused severe anemia in cats, but is still legally allowed in dog food, one small victory for felines.

Another added bonus in cat food is rendered animal fat. Rendered animal fat doesn't sound bad, but the real name for it is restaurant grease. Restaurant grease has become one of the major components of feed grade animal fat. This disgusting stuff is usually stored in fifty-gallon drums, exposed to extreme temperatures, sometimes outside for weeks at a time. This fat gets stabilized with powerful antioxidants so it doesn't spoil any further, and then is sold as a blended product to pet food companies. This is used to spray directly onto the cat food pellets to make bland, disgusting food palatable to felines. The fat also acts as a binding agent so that these manufacturers can add other flavor enhancers to trick your pet into eating it. Some manufacturers spray cat food with fish oils for the very same purpose.

Sweeteners are also added. Many cats like sweet tasting foods, just like we do, and pet food companies are going to add whatever they have that's cheap to get your feline to eat their food. Some of these companies have been known to add things like corn syrup, sucrose, ammoniated glycyrrhizin and some other sweeteners in order to increase the palatability to appeal to cats. They don't care that this additional dietary sugar has the ability to aggravate many health problems in cats, such as diabetes and obesity. These are commonly added to "kitty treats". This is certainly not good for your pet.

Sugar is another ingredient that you wouldn't think you'd find in cat food, but in a lot of the foods, it's there, especially in the semi-moist kinds. Some of the semi-moist foods can contain as much as 15% sugar. The sugar also helps to aid in bacterial contamination prevention. This amount of sugar can cause stress to a cat's pancreas and adrenal glands, thus causing diabetes. A cat should never ever have sugar.

Many commercial cat foods have added artificial coloring, and these have been associated with potential problems. FD & C red dye No. 40 is a possible carcinogen but is widely used to keep meat looking fresh. Blue No. 2 is thought to increase cat's sensitivity to viruses, but they go ahead and add that into the mixture. Another color that is commonly used and has not even been fully tested is Yellow No. 5. Several others were being using but finally were banned by the FDA. I'm sure that you must realize that this is being added for us, so that the food looks good, and we think we are giving nice pretty tasty healthy food to our feline. Believe me your cat doesn't care what color his food is.

Most dry foods contain a large amount of cereal grain to provide texture. These high carbohydrate plant products provide a cheap source of energy and they use it as filler because they don't want to use any more meat than they have to, so something else needs to be added to save them more money. Gluten meals are high protein extracts from which most of the carbohydrate has been removed. These are often used to boost protein percentages without the expense of animal source ingredients, like real meat. They have also been known to add hair to cat food, so that it will test higher for protein.

Soy is just another common ingredient found in my pet foods. It is used by the manufactures to boost the protein content testing, and also to add bulk. Tofu is good for humans to eat, but most forms of soybean don't agree with a cat's digestive system because it is unusable by the animal's body.

Corn gluten meal, and wheat gluten is also used to create the shapes of bites, chucks, and as a thickener for gravy in the canned or pouched food. I doubt that your cat cares about what cute shape his food is either, but the cat isn't the one in the store buying the pet food, you are.

Mycotoxins are also found in cat foods. What are mycotoxins? These are toxins from mold or fungi that are caused by some of today's modern farming, adverse weather conditions, improper drying and storage of crops which all contribute to mold growth. Pet food ingredients that usually are contaminated with mycotoxins are grains, wheat, corn and fishmeal, commonly used in cat food.

Pesticides and fertilizers also can leave residue on plant products. Grains that are condemned for human consumption by the USDA due to residue of chemicals or mold and mycotoxins can legally be used, without any limitations in pet food. Basically, not good enough for humans because it's dangerous, but we don't want to waste it, so let's give it to the cats and dogs.

So by now you should be wondering whom if anyone regulates the contents of pet food because this is insane. The AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials, FDA/CVM (The Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine, and the PFI (The Pet Food Institute) are in the position of regulating the pet food business. There is NO requirement that pet food products have pre-market approval by the FDA. The present regulations pretty much say that almost "anything goes." The "meat" in those "meat by-products" in some cat foods may actually contain tumors, a "protein source" which is forbidden to human consumers.

So if these pet food companies are being regulated how do they get away with this? These agencies have set standards for cat food manufacturers to follow, but they DON'T have any authority to enforce them. This is only part of the problem. How many of these cat foods aren't even being manufactured in the United States. Most cat foods are being made in Canada and other countries something that no one really was aware of until recently. If these things are happening here, what do you think is ending up in the pet food from some of these other countries?

Pet Food Recalls

Pet Food recalls; what you don't know won't hurt you, or your pet? There have been several pet food recalls, and while some of them have been widely publicized, there are many that have not. Pet food recalls are far from new, many have been covered up and hidden, and if it happens on a busy news day, the story will never make it into the headlines. Bigger news stories take precedence, and after all it's only cat and dog food. As of the writing of this book, the most recent pet food recall of Menu Foods still leaves many questions left unanswered. No one wants to give a straight answer, and as the days go by the story falls from the news. Pet food companies are hoping that people will just forget about it, and most will. (Continues...)

Excerpted from Lapping it Upby Patricia O'Grady Copyright © 2009 by Patricia O'Grady. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: AuthorHouse
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1449024300
• ISBN 13: 9781449024307
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 108
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile