>>I will look into the canned food as well, but I dont want his teeth to go bad.
While it is true that canned food can cause icky teeth in cats, it's NOT true that kibble prevents or helps with dental disease in any way. Think about it - if kibble had been shown to prevent tartar or dental disease, wouldn't that claim be plastered all over the label of every bag of kibble in the world?
Kibble is a starchy food. It has to be, or it can't hold its kibbled shape. Cats have no dietary requirement for starches AT ALL... zero. Every gram of starch in that food is there for reasons other than the nutritional benefit of your kitten, and as Abymom said, it may well be that those unneeded carbohydrates lead to diseases in cats such as diabetes. They certainly do nothing to help dental health and very likely make it worse.
Unlike humans, who have the digestive enzyme amylase in their saliva, cats and dogs cannot digest starches in their mouths. Nonetheless, they chew them - something they didn't evolve doing. This undigested starchy mass is mushed around in their mouths and driven up into the gum line, where it forms a great breeding ground for plaque, which later hardens and becomes tartar.
While not every cat who eats kibble has dental problems, the majority do. Why else would it be that "80 percent of dogs and 70 percent of cats show signs of oral disease by age three. In fact, oral disease is the No. 1 health problem diagnosed in dogs and cats." (American Veterinary Dental Society)
Wild animals in the wild, who are not debilitated by habitat destruction, over-population, or some other adverse influence, simply do not have a vast majority of the members of the species having dental disease by the age of three. A proper species-appropriate diet will keep the teeth of any species clean, barring some kind of genetic or habitat problem. There is simply no way a species is going to evolve over hundreds of thousands of years to inevitably have serious dental problems at a young age, with the attendant risks of kidney and other organ problems. It defies logic.
So, that leaves you with the decision of what the heck to do about all this.
You can do as I've done for nearly 20 years now and feed a fresh, raw homemade diet that includes bones, which results in naturally clean teeth.
You can simply teach your kitten to enjoy getting his or her teeth brushed and do that EVERY DAY of his or her life... you have to break up the biofilm once every 36 hours, or it will harden into plaque which cannot be brushed away.
You can do what most cat owners do, which is feed how you want and hope for the best, and then constantly dread and fear getting the cat's teeth cleaned professionally but doing it when you have to. This is really bad for the cat and hard on his or her kidneys and heart, as oral disease is one of the leading causes of kidney disease (rampant in cats). Bacteria in the mouth of cats with gingivitis can access the bloodstream, which can result in cardiac and other infections.
There are plenty of health and nutritional reasons not to feed kibble, but dental health to my mind is number one.
Canned food is probably better in all health respects other than dental health, and may or may not be linked to an increased incidence of feline hyperthyroidism. The answer in my mind is not to feed more kibble, but to feed more actual, real food.
I have a much longer article on this, called "Of Carnivores, Omnivores, Teeth, and Science," on my blog, if you are interested in my obsession with animal dental health. <G> It even has footnotes. Here is the link:
www.doggedblog.com/doggedblog/2004/11/of_carnivores_o.html
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Christie Keith
Caber Feidh Scottish Deerhounds
Holistic Husbandry since 1986
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