The Food, The Bad & The Ugly: Part 1 - Dry Food!

[Music] [Applause] and it's gonna be another hot dry day get away from me you buzzards you ain't gonna give me that easy i was born in the heat and i will die in the heat the desert is my home don't know me oh hello stranger there have been words about you before you ever got here and i don't like you now green horn and i'll tell you why we as humans we can choose to live in the heat it's all good some of us thrive in the heat like me but i hear you've been feeding your cat gibble kibble makes me want to hurt somebody all that heat all of that beautiful moisture just robbed [Music] stranger you and me gotta have a talk a very serious talk you ready to sit down and listen good welcome back everybody it is your ever-loving cat daddy jackson galaxy here with you and we're gonna start diving in today to what a lot of you guys ask about and i've addressed it in the past but maybe not in such a condensed way if i do anything in a condensed way but today we're going to talk about the beginnings of uh the way i see cat nutrition and that would be we're talking about the food the bad and the ugly see what we're doing here and today we're going to start with the ugly what i want to just dive right into is a big old bowl of dry food i don't i don't and i don't want your cats to either and what i'm going to describe today is why i think that dry food is by far the worst thing that we can feed our cats it is also by far the most convenient thing that we can feed our cats and back in the 50s because before that it was just pretty much all cans at least from the mass-produced variety but as soon as dry food came on the market kabang just overtook that market in a hurry and i think a lot of that is because of shelf stability and about ease of feeding what is a cat a cat is an obligate carnivore obligate carnivore means that they are distinctly built to only eat one thing and that is meat they're not grazers there are carnivores so when a cat eats prey they're eating the bones they're eating the muscle and the tissue and the fat and all that and the moisture so what we're doing in order to make meat prey into the nugget is pretty crazy the first thing i want to talk about is how far away from the actual meat source dry food is so the first step is you take the meat and you ground it up and then it is cooked under very high heat and processed so it becomes meal it's just it's basically a powder from the veggie standpoint you've got something like a pea protein or corn gluten that's what happens when you just take it down to its very powdery basics it's then fed into a massive mixer once it's in this massive mixer supplements are added it's then cooked again under a very high heat to turn it into a dough because i want you to imagine that the final sort of piece of this making of this nugget is almost like you know those those little cake icing dispensers where you put the icing and you squeeze it and then it comes out like a little star shape and you can spell happy birthday chester that's kind of what we're doing in a ten thousand pound way with with uh dry food so it's going from that dough and then it's gonna get cooked again and then it's going to come out in a uh you know the shape that we want it to look like that's what's happening here now we've got it in that shape what are we gonna have to do now that's right you guys we're gonna have to put heat to it again bake it under a very high heat in order to make it stay in that shape and now for the piece the resistance once it comes out it it doesn't smell anything like meat anymore that's for sure it's just a thing so what makes it so that our cats really want to eat it well now we're going to spray meat flavoring on it we have now taken this piece of meat and put it through four different rounds of either cooking or just exposing the heat baking processing four rounds of heat to get it into that nugget so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that for an animal who has survived for thousands of years knowing exactly what they have to eat and then you take that thing and you turn it into this thing it's going to lose something almost everything [Music] okay so that takes us through the process uh the ugly process of making dry food now let's talk about what the natural intake for a cat is because i keep talking about the raw cat the ancestral cat and what they would eat okay so what would they eat and whether it is a mouse or a rat or a bird or a cricket or anything else each piece of intake that a cat gets from their prey would be mostly protein and about eight to nine percent carbohydrate and that comes usually from the plant matter uh that would be in the praised gut so if you're going to hunt a mouse the mouse eats grass you eat the mouse you're also eating grass indirectly now i'd like you to start comparing that to what the normal carb value is for dry food from brand to brand it could be wildly inconsistent but with a 50 carb one other thing we know about carbs and cats is that it greatly increases their glycemic index their blood sugar level will just spike every time they eat it if you think about the fact that most cats who have free feeding of dry food will eat it at some point about 15 to 20 times a day just nibbling on it moving on every time glycemic index right blood sugar up it gets crazier because even though carbs increase blood sugar output in cats heating those carbs up increases the glycemic index even more it's just a double whammy they're not meant to eat carbs and they're not meant to eat these crunchy semi-quasi meaty carbs so their blood sugar is just going kabang if like you had a hyperactive child and you're giving them a buffet of twinkies all day long i mean it's just a constant and you don't know how to predict or help work with it as the day goes on because you don't know when the last time they ate but you know that what they ate caused that spike so there's that the next thing i want to talk about is moisture cats are originally desert dwelling animals and that means that they had highly super efficient kidneys most of their hydration the majority of their hydration approximately about 70 to 75 percent of their hydration comes directly from the meat that they eat dry food is literally dehydrating our cats making them more dependent on drinking water it's not till they get dangerously dehydrated that they will learn to rely on drinking water so why would we do that because dry food is robbing cats of the hydration they so sorely need we also see an uptick in things like crystals stones feline lower urinary tract disease it's fluty which is not a single disease it's a collection of diseases that we call under a singular name but there have been ties between dry food and the collection of crystals in a cat's bladder or kidneys having to work those kidneys and that bladder the whole system there extra hard and most of the reason is because there is no moisture in the diet so these systems have got to just work in a way that they're just not used to working we are asking their system to process meat in a way that it's not meant to work and when we start going against nature to this degree we wind up with obesity so now we're going to talk a little bit about fat cats one thing that i can tell clients of mine whose cats are big boned husky as i was often called when i was a child so i'm allowed to say it but is do you feed your cats dry food and the answer is most of the time yes either they feed them dry food and they have it out all the time or they give them a lot of dry treats one way or another the dry devil is there to help make them obese so we know again the cats have a low tolerance to carbohydrates we're packing it full of carbohydrates whether they're grain free or not our cats are fat because they're eating dry food if your cats were not eating dry food then the chances of them being obese are much less if you think about it by and large a cat who's living out out there in the wild doing nothing but hunting and eating is probably not going to be diabetic is probably not going to be obese because their bodies are doing exactly what nature has meant for them which is to hunt catch and kill and eat that's it now i want to have one more thing that i talk about and that is what happens when we feed dry food by and large is that we're also free feeding because it's meant to be grazed upon and anybody who knows me you guys know that that i'm just not a fan of free feeding when we free feed we are forcing them into a reality they don't belong into which is a grazer they don't need to graze their bodies know what to do with with that that carnivorous information in the most unbelievable way as i've been slowly outlining for you guys i would ask you not only to reconsider feeding your cats dry food but also to stop free feeding your cats how does that work in a behavioral context well that's for another day but i can tell you this you try asking your cat to do something for you for your household and having them not be at least partially hungry in the process we know now what meat has to go through to get into being a nugget what that nugget contains and how generally in my opinion nasty it is for a cat's well-being for their physical health i would ask you to reevaluate and get it out of there just get it gone there is no good reason for it except it's convenient i'm not a nutritionist that's not what i do by trade but i i would be an irresponsible cat daddy if i didn't go and consult with people who didn't know what they were talking about and and there are uh vets and feline nutrition advocates and all around pet nutrition advocates that that i trust greatly and i will link to some of their work in the description below so that you can be able to do your own due diligence on this because if you agree or disagree totally cool now go off and prove me right or wrong or whatever it's not about me it's about your cat and i care about your cat i know that you care even more than i do they're your family so do what you got to do let's start here and uh we're going to have more information in the coming weeks about nutrition but today we talked about the ugly so until next time green horn this is your cat daddy saying all light and all love and all mojo to you [Music] [Music] meow

Channel: Jackson Galaxy

Views: 99,970

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Keywords: jackson galaxy, cats, my cat from hell, animal planet, cat whisperer, cat guy, cat guy animal planet, cat expert, cat advice, cat health, cat behavior, pet care, pet, cat breeds, types of cats, cat care, cat training, cat supplies, cat toyskitten care, sick cat, cats and kittens, cat illnesses, cat symptoms, cat psychology, taking care of a cat, cat behavior problems, kittens, kitten videos, cat videos, kitten health, adult cat, adult cat videos, jackson galaxy videos

Id: 6cvxA1CMbMQ

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020