Why You Shouldn’t Feed Table Scraps to Cats and Dogs
📝 Summary
Table scraps are the human leftovers pets love for the smell, but nutritionally they're junk food — heavy in fat and carbs that drive obesity, loaded with salt and seasonings that harm them, and hard to digest, laying the groundwork for chronic disease. Before commercial pet food, average lifespans fell well short of their ~13-year potential; balanced diets changed that.
1 Poor or Destroyed Nutrition
Cats and dogs are meat-leaning omnivores that will eat almost anything, but human food is rich in fat and carbohydrates — calorie-dense nutrients that easily tip a well-fed pet into obesity.
2 Harmful Seasonings
Cooking adds salt, soy, vinegar, and MSG to improve color, taste, and texture; these concentrated extracts are easy to overdose on. Salt is the clear example — once a dog’s food exceeds about 1.5% salt, its health is seriously threatened.
3 Hard to Digest, Chronic Disease
Much of the human diet is coarse plant fiber, which pets struggle with — cats especially need high protein. Even though these foods hold useful nutrients, pets lack the machinery to digest them and draw them in. Some wonder why pets thrived on scraps before commercial food existed; that’s a myth. Their natural lifespan is around 13, but before pet nutrition became a science, average life fell far short of that — only rising as commercial food spread.
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