Recipes vs Variety: What’s the best way to feed a raw diet?
After discovering raw feeding, people often ask me “Which raw feeding recipe do you follow?”. As you will see in this article, I don’t have “one recipe” that I feed every day to my cats.
In fact, there are many different ways to feed a homemade raw diet and they can be split into two different categories: you can either follow a recipe or you can have a variety-based diet. In this article, I will describe these two principles, their pros and cons, and what (in my opinion) you should do.
Recipes
The “recipe” feeding principle is quite easy to explain as it is based on following a daily recipe for the diet of your cat. This means that every day your cat eats the exact same thing.
It is similar to a balanced commercial diet for our pets that follows nutritional standards such as the AAFCO, FEDIAF, and NRC. These standards define the recommended amount of each nutrient (proteins, vitamins, minerals…) in a daily diet. So, a recipe, like a commercial diet, follows these standards to ensure that the diet is balanced and complete.
The main advantage of this method is that we can be sure to feed a balanced diet daily: every day your cat will get all its needed nutrients.
On top of that, it simplifies our grocery list: if you follow a recipe you know exactly what to buy.
The main issue with this method is that the nutritional standards are not perfect, as we still don’t know everything about the science of nutrition. Some of the issues with the standards are covered in the article about the NRC. Because of this, no matter how well formulated a recipe is, I don’t believe in a “perfect” recipe.
As a recipe is made to be fed every day, all possible flaws of a recipe would be exacerbated. This is often an issue when feeding a commercial diet. For example, rice is an ingredient relatively high in arsenic and it has been reported that dogs eating kibble that contains rice every day have higher arsenic levels. The issue is not that rice contains arsenic, but rather that the dogs were eating rice every single day. In a varied diet, rice wouldn’t pose any risk.
It very often happens that cases of nutritional deficiencies come from pets eating the same unbalanced diet every day, for a long amount of time.
While this can be partially mitigated because fresh foods have natural variations in their nutritional values, it can still be a concern in my opinion.
Additionally, this can also be really problematic if the recipe is not well formulated and that is almost always the case for free recipes found on the internet. Formulating a balanced and complete recipe requires deep nutritional knowledge.
Variety
The variety principle to feed a raw diet closely resembles what is defined as a balanced human diet. For example, in France, the nutritional recommendation for human adults is to eat 5 fruits or vegetables a day, 2 dairy products a day, fish twice a week, to limit and reduce the consumption of ultra-processed food... The diet ends up being balanced from eating a diversity of food over a week while following these recommendations.
This is the kind of principle that is followed in a BARF or Prey Model Raw diet. The diet follows some ratios for each ingredient like 5% liver, 6-10% raw meaty bones… and you must feed a variety of ingredients, generally at least 3 different sources of protein.
The advantage of this principle is that the guidelines are easy to understand and don’t require advanced knowledge in feline nutrition to formulate a diet, so anyone can easily start feeding one of these types of diets.
The issue is that often these guidelines aren’t based on the nutrient requirements of cats, but try to recreate a prey that a wild cat would eat. As we have seen in the article on the Prey Model Raw diet, these recreations are not perfect: based on what ingredients are available to you, it is very much possible that you may never be able to reach a balanced diet by just following the variety principle.
For example, cats have a high requirement for iron in their diet and this requirement is close to impossible to cover if you don’t feed them either spleen or blood. Both these ingredients are hard to find for many people. In that case, no matter how much you vary the organs or types of meat, the iron requirement will almost never be fully covered.
This ends up in a few nutritional gaps that are very often present when feeding a diet based on variety.
The solution
I presented this dichotomy between a recipe and variety-based diets but the world is not black and white: we can take what’s best from the two approaches and come to a middle ground.
A simple way to solve the main inconvenience of a recipe is to vary between several recipes.
That way, even if the recipes are not “perfect”, varying between them will mitigate their possible flaws.
In the case of a diet based on variety, filling the common nutritional gaps using whole food and supplements would also be an acceptable solution. These kinds of diets that are based on ratios but take also into account the nutritional requirements of cats are often called PMR+ diets.
What is the best way to raw feed?
The best way to raw feed your cat depends on you. For example:
If you don’t have access to a large variety of protein sources, having a custom recipe tailored to what is available to you will be more convenient and will make sure that the diet is balanced.
If your cat gets bored when it always eats the same things, feeding a diet based on variety would be better.
If you are reassured by clear guidelines and precise numbers give you peace of mind, feed a recipe-based diet.
If you find it cumbersome to feed a recipe with precision, or if you think that feeding the same thing every day is boring, you can feed a diet based on variety.
To summarize, no matter the principle that you are following you should keep in mind that both variety and nutritional guidelines are important and should be taken into account.
Personally, I sometimes feed recipes (especially when I go on holiday) but most of the time I will feed a PMR+ diet: I vary the meat types, raw meaty bones, organs, and fish that I give to my cats while adding supplements according to the nutritional gaps.
Source
French nutritional recommendation
Rosendahl, S., Anturaniemi, J., & Hielm-Björkman, A. (2020). Hair arsenic level in rice-based diet-fed Staffordshire bull terriers. The Veterinary record, 186(17), e15.