Is your cat picky? It depends on whether he eats the food

Many cats are picky eaters, but researchers have found an ingredient that makes their food irresistible to them.

For many owners, the fact that their cats are picky can sometimes be a real headache. Choosing the right food, whether it’s dry or wet, for your picky cat is no easy task. In many cases they will lick the bowl clean immediately, in others the contents will remain untouched. And while it’s really beneficial to stick to a particular food for dogs, you’ll need to be much more creative when feeding kittens.

What determines whether apicky cat will eat the food?

For many cats, it is not just that they become brandy-averse, but that they will only eat one flavour combination of a particular food, so picky are they. We have looked at foreign sources to see what might be behind this type of pickiness.

Unlike humans, cats are unable to detect sweet tastes. Even though they have a receptor on their tongue that detects sweet taste, but they cannot detect the taste itself. However, like humans, they can detect umami, the so-called “fifth taste”, which is the basic sweet, sour, salty and bitter taste. Umami is the characteristic taste of protein-rich foods, and it’s no wonder that our predatory pets turn to it with affection. It has now been discovered that cats also have glutamate receptors. And this can certainly cause pickiness in some cats.

A team of researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France has decided to investigate new experimental strategies to screen for new compounds – so-called ‘flavourings’ – that activate taste receptors. The results have been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

This is why your cat is picky

The research team wanted to measure the relationship of amino acids with the cat’s umami taste receptor without actually involving the animals in the research.

The study revealed that umami in the diets acts almost like Venus’ flytrap in insects. It attracts cats and they simply can’t resist it , the compounds even trigger a neural response to detect taste.

They then tested in real life what umami does to cats when they eat it. Needless to say, as cat owners we have all experienced, our finicky pets really do get hooked on umami-rich foods.