Mary Allen
Many cat owners refuse sugar in their food because they fear tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, or an additive effect. What’s with these worries?
Does Sugar in Cat Food Make Cats Addicted?
Many cat lovers suspect that the added sugar is there to improve the taste. It is often said that the sweet taste makes cats addicted and tempts them to eat more than is good for them.
Fortunately, this suspicion is unfounded: cats do not have any taste receptors for the taste “sweet”. In terms of taste, the sugar content in cat food is completely irrelevant to them. Whether a cat finds food tasty depends primarily on the protein it contains.
What is the Purpose of Sugar in Cat Food?
People who eat healthily avoid sugar. So why do cat food manufacturers add an ingredient that has such a bad image to their products?
The eye eats with you
In most cases, the sugar in cat food is not for the benefit of the cats, but for their human “can opener” because Sugar caramelizes at high temperatures and gives the wet food or the sauce a nice caramel-brown color. Without caramel, the sauce stays light. To achieve the caramel effect, you don’t need more than 0.5% sugar in the cat food.
With some semi-moist feedstuffs (water content of 15 to 35%), however, the sugar is used for preservation, as they are more perishable than dry feed. Semi-moist feeds are mostly snacks that are given as treats in between. The sugar content for preservation is higher, so diabetic cats should avoid semi-moist snacks.
No sugar is added to dry food, but it does contain small amounts of sugar compounds that occur naturally in the grain products used. The total sugar content in the product is less than 1 percent (per 100 g OS).
How Much Sugar Do We Actually Eat Every Day?
For a long time, the WHO recommended consuming a maximum of 10% of the daily calorie intake in the form of sugar. The recommendation has since been reduced to 5%. An average adult should therefore consume around 50 g of sugar per day or, according to the new recommendation, 25 g of sugar per day.
According to a Spiegel publication in 2012, every German consumed an average of 37 kg of sugar per year in 2010/2011 (Der Spiegel 36/2012). Divided by 365 days, that’s more than 100g of sugar per day. Unfortunately, unlike cats, we are actually prone to sugar addiction.
For comparison: If you calculate with 4 kcal per gram of sugar and 100 kcal daily energy requirement of an average slim cat, then 0.5% sugar in a high-quality wet food makes up just 2.4% of the daily calorie amount.
Does Sugar Make Cats Fat and Diabetic?
Sugar makes you fat and obesity increases the risk of diabetes. This is definitely the case with us humans. Interestingly, the connection is not so simple in cats, which is due to their special dietary habits.
Since obesity is now a very common problem in house cats, there have been numerous studies that have examined what makes cats fat. Several risk factors were identified, e.g.:
- lack of exercise
- Ad libitum feeding (The cat can always use a well-filled bowl as it pleases.)
- high-fat and high-energy, tasty food
Dry food is often fed “ad libitum” because it is simply practical. At the same time, it is very rich in energy compared to wet food because it contains little moisture, i.e. all nutrients are more or less concentrated, while wet food contains up to 80% water.
However, the suspicion that the carbohydrates (including the simple sugar compounds) in dry food are responsible for obesity and diabetes has been refuted by studies with carbohydrate-free dry food. The natural sugar content in dry food, which is less than 1%, certainly does not make a cat fat and would not make a person fat either.
And what about diabetes? It has been scientifically proven that being overweight drastically increases the risk of diabetes in cats. On the other hand, long-term feeding studies with carbohydrate-rich dry food could not prove any influence on insulin release or the insulin effect in cats – so even lifelong dry food consumption did not result in a higher risk of diabetes.
Is Sugar Bad For Cat Teeth?
Every child knows that sugar causes tooth decay. That’s how it is with humans, but what about cats?
However, there is a similar condition called “Neck Lesions” or “FORL”. Their cause has not yet been clarified. However, it also occurs in cats that live in the wild and are not fed ready-made food, as well as in domestic cats.
The fact that cats do not have to worry about tooth decay is probably also due to the fact that the bacteria that give us humans tooth decay (especially Streptococcus mutants) do not occur in their mouths. When they break down sugar, these bacteria form acids that attack the tooth enamel and thus trigger tooth decay. The pH value in the cat’s mouth is significantly higher than in humans, which means that acids are neutralized and the acid-forming bacteria do not really feel comfortable in such an environment.