Cat Food Minimum Protein Calculator – Truth about Pet Food
Pet food formulator Steve Brown provides pet owners with this easy method to know exactly how much pet food to provide to meet minimum protein requirements.
What if you are not/cannot feed the recommended amount to meet minimum protein requirements?
In many instances, a pet would gain weight if you fed the recommended amount of pet food needed to meet the minimum protein requirements. If you are feeding less food (less kcals than the result above), Steve Brown offers us these suggestions to meet the minimum protein requirements:
- Switch to a pet food with a higher protein percentage. Such as – using a dry food as the example – if your current pet food is 30% Protein (listed in the Guaranteed Analysis) – switch to a pet food that is 35% Protein.
- Or, increase the protein your pet is receiving each day by adding fresh meat to your pet’s diet. For every gram of protein needed, you can add 5 grams of raw lean beef or raw chicken (roughly a heaping teaspoon) – or 4 grams of cooked beef or chicken to your pet’s daily diet (roughly a heaping teaspoon).
To calculate how many grams of meat to add to your pet’s diet daily:
Grams of protein needed per day (from the chart above) divided by the number of kcals needed of this pet food (the end result from above), times the amount of kcals you are currently feeding = the grams of protein you are currently feeding.
Such as, if you are currently feeding 15 grams of protein and your cat needs 17.1 grams – add roughly two heaping teaspoons of raw or cooked lean meat daily to their food (one heaping teaspoon per gram deficient).
