Raw Cat Food, AGEs, and Pottenger's Cats: What Sabrina of RAWR Wants Cat Parents to Know

Cats get the short end of the pet parenting stick. The dog down the hall gets a nutritionist, a rotation of toppers, and a Pinterest board. The cat gets whatever was on the end cap at the grocery store, and we call it a day because she "seems fine." (She's a cat. She'd seem fine at her own funeral.)

That's why I was so happy to sit down at SuperZoo with Sabrina Simmons, founder of RAWR and the woman behind my own cat's auto-ship. She's been on the show before, in Episode 199: Raw Feeding for Cats, and if you haven't heard that one, start there. This time we dug into her Parts Department, why canned food is a stepping stone and not a destination, and two pieces of research that landed in my lap right as I was prepping: a brand-new study on AGEs in canned cat food, and a brand-new contaminant investigation from the Clean Label Project that I have thoughts about.

Listen to the episode here if you want the full conversation. Here's what's in it, plus the receipts.

The Parts Department: what happens between a whole animal and a scoop

Sabrina started the Parts Department for DIY feeders. When she was making cat food for her own cat, she could find duck breast and that was it. Liver, gizzards, hearts? Good luck. So she built the line she wished existed. The first few months, she didn't even use the stuff herself. Then a customer asked for turkey tails, the dogs went nuts for them, and she noticed something that kept bugging her in the best way: how much effort and time chewing takes, and how much that effort does for the animal.

Her phrase for it has stuck with me. The pet food conversation is obsessed with protein and calories, and we've skipped over "what happened between a whole animal and it being scoopable." Bones, skin, tendons, cartilage, eyes, brains. Wild cats start with the head, for good reason. A grind in a bowl doesn't give a cat any of that, nutritionally or behaviorally.

The line is now around 21 items and growing: chicken hearts, chicken necks, chicken paws, duck necks, green lipped mussel, ground goat, quail, a chicken organ medley, and more. A boneless pork is on the way. And yes, they work for dogs. Mine got a chicken head in the mail one week and it was the most enriching thing that has ever happened to her. (Girls Gone Raw gets a plug here too, since we both love her stuff. Lauren's been on the show too: Greenwashing in the Pet Industry.)

The rule Sabrina and I both landed on: parts are a supplement to a complete and balanced diet, not a replacement for one. Her cat gets a complete meal in the morning and half a complete meal in the evening, with the other half rotating through necks, hearts, sardines, mussels, and quail. Same food in a lick mat takes two minutes. A quail she has to dismantle takes real time. That's the difference between eating and dining, and it matters for a species whose jaws were built to tear.

If you're new to parts and don't know where to start, Sabrina's tip is to start with a grind or an organ medley mixed into what your cat already eats, then work toward larger pieces. She also finds organ-heavy foods some of the best transition tools she's seen. A cat who has only ever eaten kibble can be talked into a bowl of organs, especially with a splash of bone broth. One warning: kibble-fed cats sometimes go gung-ho on fresh organs and their digestive systems throw a fit, so go slow.

Whole animals, tiny supplement lists

Sabrina's formulation philosophy is the opposite of the usual shortcut. She starts with a whole duck, whole chicken, or whole rabbit, adds the offal, and sees where the nutrition lands. Because the food starts as an actual animal, supplementation in every RAWR product is under half a percent, and the mix is tailored to each protein. The duck bag and the rabbit bag don't get the same blend.

She formulates herself first, then runs it past a nutritionist, then lab tests. She works with individual farms rather than buying whatever truckload is cheapest this quarter. When avian flu was in the headlines, she could call her farmers and ask what they were seeing and ask for test results. Her chicken is California ground chicken, and she can tell you which farm. That kind of traceability is the whole ballgame for the people who listen to this show.

Two more details worth keeping. RAWR's bone-in recipes are complete and balanced for all life stages. Her boneless line uses eggshell powder instead of bone, which she built to ease the phosphorus load on aging kidneys, and she suggests cats two and older eat from it at least half the time. Kittens need different levels of protein, fat, and phosphorus than adults do. Adult cats on kitten-level everything are basically drinking baby formula and asking their kidneys to deal with it.

Why canned isn't the finish line

Here's where it gets spicy. Sabrina isn't anti-canned. Neither am I. Wet food is a legitimate first step for a kibble addict, and cats are imprint eaters: whatever they meet in the first weeks after weaning becomes their definition of "food." Some transitions take patience and a little theater. (She told me about a client who transitioned her cat to raw by smearing it on the corner of a corn chip. I was horrified. It worked. The cat now hunts and the client doesn't buy food. I have no further comment.)

But a stepping stone is not a destination, and the research is catching up to why.

The AGE study

Right before we recorded, I'd seen new research on advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) in cat food, published in the Journal of Animal Science. AGEs form when proteins react with sugars under heat, the same Maillard chemistry that browns toast. In human and rodent studies, high dietary AGE exposure is associated with inflammation and chronic disease.

AGEs form when proteins react with sugars under heat, the same Maillard chemistry that browns toast. And no, this isn't a fringe worry. AGEs bind to a cell receptor called RAGE, which switches on inflammation and oxidative stress. In people, a 2017 meta-analysis of 17 randomized controlled trials (560 participants) found that low-AGE diets lowered insulin resistance, total cholesterol and LDL, along with inflammatory markers like TNF-alpha, 8-isoprostane (an oxidative stress marker), and circulating AGEs themselves (Baye et al., Scientific Reports). Other reviews tie high-heat-processed food to kidney damage, low-grade inflammation and atherosclerosis. The picture is messier in healthy people, where some trials show less effect, but the direction of the evidence is clear.

The researchers, led by Devon Tate, analyzed 26 commercial cat foods from the US and UK: 6 mildly cooked fresh diets, 10 retorted wet foods, and 10 extruded dry foods. The retorted wet foods came in at roughly three times the total AGEs of either of the others (Petfood Industry summary). So yes, canned cat food topped kibble, which is exactly what I told Sabrina.

The why is the interesting part. Kibble is extruded at very high temperatures, but only for seconds. Retorting, the sterilization that makes canned food shelf-stable, cooks food for 20 to 120 minutes. Time, not just temperature, is doing the damage. In her Q&A with Petfood Industry, Tate said that when a mildly cooked diet was put through retort-like sterilization in preliminary internal work, its AGEs jumped markedly.

Now the honest caveats. This particular study measured AGEs in the food, not what they do inside a cat, and the authors say so. There's no long-term feline trial yet showing disease outcomes. But we're not flying blind. A 2024 study in healthy dogs fed four differently processed diets found that the canned wet food had the highest dietary AGEs and produced significantly higher AGE levels in the dogs' blood than the others, and the mildly cooked food produced the lowest (J Anim Physiol Anim Nutr). So dietary AGEs don't just sit in the can. They end up in the animal. Pair that with the human trial data above, and "let's not feed a carnivore the most heat-damaged food on the shelf every day" is a reasonable position, not a leap. Raw food wasn't in the 26 products tested, so the claim that raw is lowest is a logical extension of the chemistry, not something this study measured. I'd love to see someone test it.

The Clean Label Project cat food study

Then there's the news that dropped this month. On October 2, the Clean Label Project published its first cat food investigation: 100 products from 62 brands (dry, wet, air-dried and freeze-dried), tested by an independent ISO 17025 lab for more than 122 contaminants. It's been covered by CNN and a lot of local news.

What they found:

Heavy metals were close to universal: lead in 99% of products, cadmium in 96%, and arsenic in 94%. The worst products carried about 3.5 times more lead than the typical product. Fish-based foods had roughly 18 times the mercury of everything else, and about 2.5 times the cadmium. Dry food carried about three times the lead of wet or air-dried. Glyphosate showed up in 37% of products, rising about 40% with each additional plant ingredient among the first ten on the label. The plasticizer DEHP was in 48 of 100 products, and canned and pouched foods carried about five times as much as bagged ones. In 35 of 100 products, a meat or fish first ingredient was outnumbered by plant ingredients in the top ten, which is the ingredient-splitting trick.

Two takeaways I'd hang on the fridge. Protein source mattered more than format: 84.8% of poultry foods met the Clean Label Project's standard versus 25.7% of fish foods. And nobody's bag is exempt, "natural" and "premium" included. I don't want to oversell it either. It's a single batch of each product, measured against the CLP's own standard, and the pet food industry's trade press ran a piece disputing the study. Read the full report and decide for yourself.

What does a raw-feeding cat parent do with this? Their own advice lines up with how we feed: rotate proteins so no single source is your cat's only exposure, read past the first ingredient, and ask your brand whether they test the finished product, not just the inputs. Sabrina's answer to that last one is lab testing on top of her own formulation and a nutritionist's review. And since mussels and sardines are fish, they're a rotation food, not a daily one.

Pottenger's cats, and why I still bring them up

Whenever canned food comes up, I can't help mentioning Francis Pottenger. Between the early 1930s and the early 1940s, he fed roughly 900 cats across four generations. One group got raw meat, raw milk, and cod liver oil. The other got cooked meat with the same milk and oil. In his 1946 report in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery, the raw-fed cats stayed healthy and the cooked-meat cats developed skeletal, organ, and reproductive problems that worsened with each generation. The full story is on Wikipedia and in his book, Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition.

I'd be a bad nutritionist if I handed you that without the asterisks. The study wasn't well controlled by modern standards, and the idea that acquired damage passes to kittens as heritable "germ plasm" injury has been discredited. A 2014 paper in The FASEB Journal argued that the cooked-meat cats' problems match taurine deficiency, since taurine hadn't been identified as essential for cats in Pottenger's day and cooking degrades it.

Here's how I read that, and it's the opposite of a gotcha. Pottenger stumbled onto a heat-sensitive nutrient before anyone had a name for it. The industry's fix was to cook everything, watch the nutrients disappear, and then dump a lab-made version back in so the label passes. That's the whole model of a lot of commercial cat food: strip it, then rebuild it from a supplement pack. It's the opposite of ReWilding. A cat eating a mouse doesn't need a premix, because the taurine is already in the animal. This is Sabrina's point about supplementation too. When the food starts as a whole animal and stays close to raw, her list is under half a percent. When it's cooked long and hard, the supplement list has to carry a lot more of the load.

The bigger point: what is a cat?

The question Sabrina asked at the end is the one I keep coming back to. Ask people what a cat is, and they say predator. Then we put the predator in an apartment, feed it something shaped like a pellet, and act shocked when it's anxious. Her cats-first mindset applies to everything: if your cat wakes you at 4 a.m., maybe move dinner closer to bedtime before you buy the automatic feeder. If the litter box smells, look at what's going in before you buy the plug-in. (Her mom's young raw-fed cat was waking them at 4 a.m. Dinner was at 5 p.m. I suggested moving a portion to right before bed. Problem solved, no gadget.)

That's what ReWilding is, at its core. You stop managing symptoms and start asking what the animal in front of you needs and what's been taken away from her.

Where to find Sabrina and RAWR

Shop RAWR online or find a store near you with their store locator. Browse the Parts Department, the bone-in line, or the boneless line. If you're thinking about making the leap from canned or kibble, start with my guide to changing your cat's food and my ReWild Your Pet's Diet page. My favorite brands live on the Recommended Brands page.

Please give your pets some extra love from both of us this week.

Listen to the full episode here