Homemade cooked food for my cat!
This month of June 2020, Néline has been eating a cooked diet instead of her usual raw diet, following an accident.
Why a cooked diet?
At the end of May, we forgot to close the bathroom door after putting some drain cleaner to unclog our bathtub we realized our mistake two minutes after pouring it, but Néline was already in the bathtub smelling the product. She had some drain cleaner on her fur so we ran to our closest vet emergency clinic, as she might have licked the product. They rinsed her mouth, gave her some medicine to protect her stomach, and hospitalized her for the night. Thankfully she probably didn’t lick or swallowed any of the product, as she neither threw up nor had any injury to her tongue and mouth. However, she still got some drugs to take for one month, to make her stomach less acidic in order to protect it in case of injury.
For these reasons, I decided to temporarily switch her to a cooked diet, as the naturally high stomach acidity is important to digest raw meaty bones and helps to protect the cats from the bacteria in the meat.
Cooked pork without supplements
Diet composition
In a cooked diet, you cannot feed raw meaty bones so you need to replace them with a mineral supplement that will bring, for example, calcium and phosphorus. The easiest way to balance a cooked diet is to use a vitamins and minerals supplement which is formulated to equilibrate a meat-only diet.
To plan her balanced diet, I used a calculator made by French professional pet nutritionists.
For the past month her diet has been composed of:
Cooked lean pork
Vit’i5, a minerals and vitamins supplement.
Canola oil, replaced 3 times a week by a capsule of fish oil.
Wheat bran
The pork provides the macronutrients (proteins and fat), and energy in the diet. The wheat bran provides fibers. The canola oil provides essential fatty acids, namely the alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3), and linoleic acid (omega-6); it also lowers the ratio omega-6:omega-3 of the diet. The capsule of fish oil brings EPA and DHA, two omega-3s that are not found in the canola oil and, like the canola oil, these capsules also lower the ratio omega-6:omega-3.
Finally, Vit’i5 is a meal completers that brings all the vitamins and minerals that would have been brought by offals and raw meaty bones in a raw diet. It also includes taurine, an essential amino acid for cats.
Since the supplement brings all the micronutrients needed in the diet, it isn’t necessary to have a large variety of meat in the diet.
So far I covered the nutritional part of her diet. Now I will talk a bit more about how Néline accepted her new diet.
Cooked pork with the supplements
In the beginning, she didn’t really like her new cooked diet, and she was letting most of the food. I also noticed that she struggled to eat cooked pork. In fact, the cooked meat is much tougher than raw meat and so it is more difficult to grab and chew. For these reasons, I have cut the meat in really small pieces, which made it easier for her to eat.
I also generously added some of her favorite treats (freeze-dried chicken) sprinkled on top of her food. With the treats on top, she ate most of her food. I progressively decreased the quantity of treats, and after 2 weeks she started eating the food even without the treats.
I also kept and froze the liquid (myoglobin) that was released when I cooked the meat. I then added this myoglobin to the supplements before feeding, to both make it more palatable and to add moisture to the food.
Preparation and price
As expected, prepping the food for a cooked diet was more time consuming than when I prepare raw meat, as it adds an extra step: cooking. I also needed to cut the meat in very small pieces, and that made the process even longer. Plating the food was also slightly longer because there are more things to add, like the supplement, wheat bran, oil…
In terms of price, I didn’t precisely calculate how much it cost me. However, I can say that for me it was much more expensive than a raw diet. The vit’i5 supplement is quite expensive at around 30€ for 250 g (~ 35 USD for 9 oz) and it lasts a bit more than one month. This is approximately the same price for the 4-5kg of muscle meat needed for this diet. However, when I feed a raw diet, I don’t only feed meat but also offals and other animal parts which are generally less expensive than muscle meat. So I would say that the cooked diet is significantly more expensive than a raw diet in my case, as the supplement almost double the monthly price.
The supplements
Differences from a raw diet
When compared to a raw diet, the main difference I noticed of the cooked diet was that Néline was drinking more water: she usually rarely drinks any. In fact, when you cook the meat, it will lose some of its moisture content. For this reason, cats need to drink more to compensate for the lower level of moisture in the food.
I didn’t notice any significant difference in the stool quality, fur, or energy level of Néline, as I changed her diet for just one month: it may not have been a long enough period to see any major difference.
The supplements
My opinion after one month
A cooked diet, with a multivitamin and minerals supplement, is an easy diet to balance and it has many benefits in comparison to processed industrial food like kibbles or canned wet food. In fact, it’s still a homemade diet, where the macronutriments come from lightly processed muscular meat, that can be tailored to your cat needs. You also perfectly know what your cat eats. It is also a great alternative to a raw diet in the cases when a cat cannot eat a raw diet for various health reasons like it was for Néline.
However, I would say that it lacks some of the benefits of a raw diet, such as the cleaning effect of raw meaty bones on teeth health, the mental stimulation from eating different kinds of meat, and the higher moisture level.
I hope that sharing my personal experience with a cooked diet will be helpful if one day you find yourself in a similar situation.