Customer Reviews

Natural Nutrition for Cats: The Path to Purr-fect Health

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Lots of great (scary!) info on the unregulated pet food industry in this country. If you are on the border about switching your cat to a raw food diet, this book will give you the motivation to never feed with commercial pet food again! Lots of detail on how to make your own food and what supplements to add (and why). After conventional vets could do no more for my kitty (and I think were making him worse!) I started taking him to a small-animal osteopath/homeopath. She has been using raw diets on her animals for 12 years and said she found that the animals actually do better on just whole ground up animals (including some liver, heart, gizzard and the ground bones). She did not recommend feeding extra supplements.. If all the supplement preparation in the book looks too overwhelming for you, just try the ground up animal since it is still WAY better than the commercial poisons. Just remember that you must include some taurine (heart and gizzards) and a small amount of liver and some bone for them to get a balanced diet. I think the supplement controversy comes in because cats eating whole animals would eat the stomach and everything and most likely get some vegetable matter from what their prey (mostly mice) would eat. Find a good butcher who will grind whole chickens, cornish hens or quail, rabbits, and turkey meat with added organ meats. They will most likely want to do it at the close of business just before they clean their machines since they would contaminate other meats ground afterwards.. Get the meat coarse-ground and add some small cut-up pieces if you have the time so your kitty has something to chew on.. Also,try to get meats without hormones or antibiotics since cats little bodies really aren't equipped to handle all that either.. although, raw with hormones and antibiotics is still better than commercial as well.. Have patience, if your kitty is addicted to his crunchies, you may have to put a few in the raw food to get him to start eating.. My sister and I both did the "sink or swim" philosophy with our cats (here's the food, eat it) and they both took to it pretty quickly.. and are eating with gusto now! One great benefit is that their poo gets tiny and all dried up with no smell! My kitty had HUGE stinky poo before the raw diet: guess the commercial food had so little nutrient value that it all came out in the litter box! ..Oh, and my kitty is now putting weight back on and his fur is getting thicker every day!

This book contains information that every pet owner should know about! I have a good friend whos cat was killed by eating a well known brand of cat food that was included in the pet food recall last year. This book gives you all the information you need to protect yourself and your cat from such a tragic fate. The book is a worthy follow up to Kymythy Schultze's other two books that I recommend to everyone. The No-Cook book for People and Pets is my favorite receipe book of all time, and the Natural Nutrion for Dogs and Cats book was what started me feeding a homemade diet years ago. She has done a brilliant job of updating the information in the first book and adding new and very timely information for cats and their people. As usual Ms. Schultze adds her brand of humor and charm to the subject, making it a very enjoyable read. I really enjoyed the cat pictures too. Great book!

This little gem really spells out how to feed your cat. I have known for years that a raw diet is the best way to feed them, but I could never get my two boys to eat anything raw. This book has helped me feed them right. I am almost there. In another few days they will be eating a completely raw diet. I no longer give them dried food. I know they like it but it is so bad for them, even the high quality, low carb variety that I have because it has been cooked. My cats have already lost weight and their coats are shinier and healthier. Knowing what I know about the human diet (that we eat too many carbs and not enough fat) I am certain that having my cats eat an ancestral diet is the way to keep them healthy and disease free. I highly recommend this book if you want your cats to live a long and healthy life.

I found the subject intriguing and have a lot of respect for holistic approaches. The discussion of the dark side of the pet food industry was troubling and made me really rethink what I am feeding to my cat. I also respect the author's emphasis in obtaining nutrients from food (the synergistic blend of nutrients in food can't be duplicated in a lab) rather than pills and supplements. Her approach to nutrition can and should very easily transfer to how we (humans) should eat for optimal health.

Unfortunately, there is some seriously sloppy science and argumentation that occurs in the book. For one, the author states that grains should not be part of a cat's diet. Grains are cheap and make up a large part of commercial cat food. Cats are evolutionarily equipped to eat raw meat so that's what we should feed our cats. She insists that this is safe because cats survived millions of years eating raw meat without bacterial problems. The problem in this country is that our farm animals are eating things that they were not evolutionarily equipped to eat. Cows being fed grain has resulted in the evolution of acid-resistant E. coli strains. The acid-resistant E. coli strains have been an issue for human health too. Our farm chickens are also raised in very unsanitary conditions resulting in higher levels of Salmonella, making me very wary of feeding raw chicken to my cat. The author did warn against feeding our cats raw pork because it might not be safe - I'm not sure why she thinks pork is unsafe while beef and chicken are. As far as I know, the main reason why people cooked pork to well done was to kill the parasitic roundworm Trichinella spiralis. Nowadays, the risk of contracting trichinosis from eating undercooked pork is very rare. But T. spiralis is still found in wild animals. So yes, it is natural for cats to hunt and eat wild animals like rabbits. But it is also natural for cats to contract parasites from these natural diets. While the author stresses that we should try to feed our cats organic meats if budgets allow. I agree with this. But feeding our cats raw conventional meat has its potential risks. The author clearly has her own agenda and makes no mention of these potential risks. She dismisses any real discussion about these risks by giving anecdotes of all the healthy pets she and her vet have met who eat raw food diets. These anecdotes are helpful but they are not scientific.

While criticizing how the pet food industry derives its nutrient formulations from studies done on animals that are not cats, the author will make a case for why artificial dyes, benzoic acid, BHA,BHT, MSG, and citric acid are bad for cats while referencing studies that most likely were not done on cats (I'm not entirely sure because the author never footnotes any of the scientific claims she makes). I understand that it is not scientifically sound to make conclusions about cat nutrition if all the studies done were done on horses because they are two different animals, but as someone who is relatively familiar with the scientific process, many of the breakthroughs found in human nutrition were from studies done on animals that were not human. Other breakthroughs were from accidents - yes it's sad that many kitties died because the pet food industry did not realize that taurine was an essential amino acid. It's happened in the human world too. Sometimes the only way to figure out FOR SURE that something is essential for a particular animal is to do testing on that animal. But I'm sure if scientists were starving some cats of an essential nutrient to prove that it is essential, the author and others would throw a fit.

All in all, the book does a good job in starting a cultural dialogue on the issue. That's it. Hopefully it can result in more scientific inquiry on what is best for our cats. Until then, I will be on the lookout for better resources.

Natural Nutrition for Cats: The Path to Purr-fect Health

This book is chock full of information that every cat owner should be given when they first adopt a kitten. It's a must read about pet food companies and how they operate.

I can't believe that I never knew how important a raw diet can be for the health of our cats! My father was a vet and we never talked about this. I just recently connected with a group in northern California that has cats living to be 20, even 25 yrs old! The secret seems to be feeding them the correct nutrients which includes raw foods. I have known over 20 vets for years and not one of them has ever mentioned a raw food diet and how much healthier cats are when fed this way. I am saddened to think that those I entrusted with my pets' health didn't guide me to the best for them!

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to give their beloved kitty more healthy happy years of life! I also encourage you to check out "Pottenger's Cats"- a study from the 1930s that is very revealing!

I was mainly on the lookout for information on holistic means to feed your cat so as to minimize feline urinary tract infections, and stumbled across this book.

It is meant to address the homeopathic care of cats overall, and urinary health falls under that heading, obviously. What I appreciated about the book was the wealth of information about the immense improvements in your cat's quality of life - in EVERY area - that can be achieved with the use of natural foods. While I agree with one reviewer that there could have been more emphasis on scientific studies, rather than anecdotes, to serve as a foundation for the author's arguments, there is still a great deal to like about this book.

I recommend you start here as a way to familiarize yourself with the holistic concepts that are being presented. If you are actively researching information on food choices to improve your cat's condition, or hoping to find a means of preventing future health issues, what you learn here might be a real eye-opener for you. From an indictment of the commercial cat food industry to the infinitely superior and commonsense alternatives, I think you'll be glad you gave this book a closer look.

Mrz. Schultze is not only an acomplished pet food maker, but a clear, concise and well researched writer as well. Her book has helped me to not only know how to make the healthiest food possible for my cat's but almost more importantly, she's helped me to understand why it's so important to do so. Wether your ready to dive in and start making everything from scatch or perhaps just getting started in the catfood kitchen, she has recipies for you. I highly recomend this book and I enjoyed her writing style so much that I read it cover to cover just hours after it arived. Her writing style is very reader friendly and easy to understand, and the amount of research that she has done has certainly saved me a lot of leg work.
Thank you for this book! I'm greatful it's on my shelf!

If you really love your cats, you HAVE TO read this book and DO what it says.

This is an easy read that breaks down in layman's terms how cats are designed and why they need the food that they need. Gives some basic recipes for cat food, but I would do a little more research before feeding a raw diet.

I read through this book, and found some good info, but I remain unconvinced by her thesis, which is that the only way to feed your cat a meal with proper nutrition for cats is to feed meals consisting of raw meat and bone, and a few other supplements.

The core of her thesis seems to be that "this is what they do in the wild", thus it must be optimal, and that there is no evidence that her diet is *not* harmful to cats, and that we should follow "common sense". Meanwhile she laments actual scientific studies on cat nutrition, and she also makes some pretty surprising but unsubstantiated claims, like that cats in our "grandparents" era frequently lived into their late mid-late twenties (in age), presumably because of their more
"natural" diet.

I dunno. I guess she really gives me no reason to believe a lot of what she is saying, other than to take it on faith. All she is able to do is talk about some anecdotal evidence that her diet is beneficial. She also tells a lot of "scare" stories about the pet food companies behaving extremely irresponsibly with regards to quality control and poisoning our cats with horrible ingredients.

There are a few things in the book that I found useful, like her breakdown, ingredient by ingredient of a (un-named) popular pet food. And also some of her commentary on particular aspects of the cat's dietary needs. Other than that though, I think she focuses a bit too much on the scare tactics and not enough science to convince me of her thesis.