Fancy Feast, Elegant Medleys?

Question

Someone told me that Fancy Feast Elegant Medleys were better for your cat because it offers better nutritional value.

It's more expensive, but I will buy it for my cat if it really is better for him...

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Answer 1

Many, not all of the regular fancy feasts are fine and are considered middle grade foods. The medley unfortunatly have alot of groundf grains which isn't the best for cats. The ones that are under 10% carbs and feedable are
Shredded Lean Turkey Fare Shredded White Meat Chicken Fare and Shredded Wild Salmon Fare w/ GrdGrns . They are all at the borderline with about 10% carbs apiece.
If you are willing to spend that much you would be much better off with wellness or merrick which is just a bit more money.

Nutrition since there are so many bad things out there is very important to your cat’s health
Contrary to what you may have heard, dry foods are not a great thing to feed a cat.
Dry foods are the number 1 cause of diabetes in cats as well as being a huge contributing factor to kidney disease, obesity, crystals, u.t.i’s and a host of other problems. The problems with it are that they are loaded with carbohydrates which many cats (carnivores) cannot process. Most of the moisture a cat needs is gotten
out of the food and 95% of it is zapped out of dry foods in the processing. Also, most use horrible ingredients and don't use a muscle meat as the primary ingredient and use vegetable based protein versus animal. Not good for an animal that has to eat meat to survive.
You want to pick a canned food w/o gravy (gravy=carbs) that uses a muscle meat as the first ingredient and doesn't have corn at least in the first 3 ingredients if at all. Fancy feast is a middle grade food with 9lives, friskies whiskas lower grade canned and wellness and merrick upper grade human quality foods.Also, dry food is not proven to be better for teeth. Please read about cat nutrition.

http://www.newdestiny.us/nutritionbasics.html

Answer 2

I don't know about Fancy Feast Elegant Medley's vs. other grocery store foods but I do know that in the scheme of things, it's a pretty low quality food. If you can, you should be feeding something like Innova Evo or Wellness or Merrick. These foods are very high quality. The benefit is there are no grains (which are a major source of cat food allergies), or by-products. They are nutrient dense which means they will eat less but get all the nutrition they need. This means it is ultimately cheaper in and of itself. It is also cheaper because the higher quality will help prevent illnesses like kidney failure which will cost you in vet bills. I have one cat that won't eat any wet cat food except Merrick but she loves Merrick. They have great flavors like Thanksgiving Day Dinner and Cowboy Cookout. It's very healthy and was not part of the recent pet food recall. Since switching to Merrick, this cat's chronic renal failure does not even show up on a blood test. It's there but she is so much healthier now that switching her diet made her healthy again. I also feed Innova Evo Dry but try to emphasize the wet food as this is much healthier than dry food.

Answer 3

NO NO AND NO!!!!

What crap food. Please learn how to read ingredients. There are byproducts and corn and wheat and junk cats do not need. If you see a cat in a corn field it's because he's chasing a mouse or a bird, not eating corn.

For a decent canned look into Innova or at least Wellness which you can easily find in small petshops and PetSuppliesPlus . www.petsuppliesplus.com is a small chain just not as huge as Petsmart. Petsmart doesn't carry decent brands and neither do the grocery stores. If you have to go to Petco, Natural Balance is probably their best canned.

This website is geared towards dogs but it's the same info on how to choose a decent food:
http://dogaware.com/

This website explains a lot of ingredients and sells high quality foods:
http://www.naturapet.com/tools/

Here's a few yahoo groups where you can learn more and get advice and opinions from people who know a lot of stuff. Unlike the Yahoo Answers where anyone can answer you and you don't know what to believe because so many different answers. A lot of people just like to tell you what their cats "like" and it doesn't make it good for them so asking on groups geared towards this is the best way to learn.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/holisticcat/
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/CatNutrition/
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/cats-healthandbehavior/
If you're interested in raw feeding:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/rawpaws/?yguid=224084381

I think you have to pay to join this forum but you can read the forums for free and they talk about food a lot :
http://www.holisticat.com/forum

Answer 4

My cat Maya is 2 and a half years old and she loves Fancy Feast. It has not given her any problems. However that should not be all she is eating. Too much canned food can be bad for their health. For Maya we leave 1/2 a cup of "Iams hairball remedy for indoor cats" dry food in her dish at all times. Her vet says that it is as good as the kinds of food vets sell and it helps for hairballs. The Dry food cleans their teeth. It addition to that we give her 1/4 of the small fancy feast can once in the morning and once at supper time. Any more than that and there is a chance that your cat could get over weight.

Answer 5

Don't bother. This is not good food. For one, they contain wheat-gluten - a known allergen. Also byproducts, spinach (why?) cornstarch (allergen), soy (allergen). Amazingly, they've used all three of the big no-nos - corn, wheat AND soy!

Fancy Feast has been referred to as "kitty crack."

If you do want to feed better food, choose one from the What to feed link. THESE are all much better foods.

A good rule of thumb is that if you can buy it in the grocery store, it's crap.

EDIT: I'm having trouble posting my link....
Go to catinfo . org / commercial canned foods . htm
Sorry - that should all be smushed together but I'm trying to get past this bug....

Answer 6

I was looking at those today--not all that good actually, most of the first ingredients were by-products not actual meat. It's not the best, and I didn't think the price was justified.

Answer 7

i had some free coupons to try it and it made my cat vomit...i dont think they are any better than any other cat foods they are just made out to be...and most of them are fish flavored which arent good for your cat anyway