Chicken is a key ingredient in our cat foods. As an animal-based protein, chicken in a cat's diet can help maintain muscle structure. It's a protein source that naturally provides each of the amino acids that are essential to carnivorous animals like cats and their big cat cousins that prowl the plains of Africa. And chicken adds great taste.
Chicken is flesh and skin without internal organs or feathers.
Chicken meal includes flesh, skin and bone that have been cleaned, dried, cooked and ground.
Chicken by-product meal is flesh and skin, internal organs including intestines and bone that has been cleaned, dried, cooked and ground.
Chicken fat, a high-quality energy source, provides essential fatty acids, including Eukanuba's exclusive patented component – OmegaCOAT™ – that helps support skin and coat health.
Another common chicken-based ingredient is natural chicken flavor, also called chicken digest. Natural chicken flavor adds palatability and nutrients. It is high-quality protein and fat material that has been reduced to amino and fatty acids to improve taste through an enzymatic process.
Internal organs are rich sources of protein, fats and minerals, such as iron, that are essential to cat health and add to the palatability of the pet food. Including some ground bone provides a good source of minerals, such as calcium. Some pet food manufacturers formulate their products without such ingredients to appeal to cat owners, rather than for optimal health of the cats themselves. However, the nutritional needs of cats are not the same as the nutritional needs of humans.
Chicken protein sources contained in our chicken-based cat foods undergo an extra refining process to further improve the protein quality. Refined chicken, chicken meal and chicken by-product meal are excellent and complete sources of protein since they naturally contain each of the amino acids that are essential to cats.
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