Poor Garfield. He loves to eat Lasagna, but according to veterinarians, the pasta dish is not the best thing to have in your diet. While most agree that it can be eaten as a snack, it should not take the place of normal meals.
Cats, unlike dogs or humans, are carnivores. That means that we need to get most of our nutrition from meat. In a perfect world, there would be lasagna critters scampering through the walls of our houses, crawling across our floors, climbing our trees, or even flinging themselves selflessly into our food dishes. We could hunt them down, break their necks, and munch on them to our heart’s content. Unfortunately, lasagna is almost a vegetarian food. It doesn’t have legs, feet, or even a face. The only meat products in it are cheese and, if you’re lucky, maybe some sausage or other ground meat.
According to Dr. Mike Richards, DVM, “If you fed the cats just human foods you could run into problems with taurine deficiency and that could cause cardiomyopathy, a heart problem. If you keep the human food treats to less than 10% of the diet, there shouldn’t be any problems with this, though.”
Taurine is, however, found in raw meats! So, if you want to eat a lot of delicious food, I suggest chowing down on sushi. Just be sure to go easy on the rice, since it has almost no nutritional value for us kitty cats. There are a variety of different sushi flavors, such as salmon, tuna, shrimp, mackerel, clam, yellowtail, beef, horse, halibut, swordfish, crab, snapper, carp, blue marlin, trout… oh, excuse me, I got carried away there. Let’s just say there’s a lot of delicious food to be had if you just give up lasagna and give sushi a chance.
Sure, sushi can’t sprout legs to let you chase it all over the kitchen, but if your human is nice maybe you can convince him to tie the sushi to a string and let you eat it when you catch it. That’s a lot better than he can do with those kibble pellets, too!
Links:
Veterinary Information: Diet Problems in Cats
Cat Nutrition: The Difference Between Cats and Dogs
