White Rice

No. Cats have no need for carbohydrate, and rice in the food takes the place of meat or fat.

White rice is rice with the hull, bran and germ milled away. What remains is mostly starch. Tufts veterinary nutritionists say cats can digest and metabolize properly cooked carbohydrates. Pettings notes that white rice is easy to digest and rarely linked to food allergies. If your cat has a medical condition, ask your veterinarian before changing its food.

Source: sites.tufts.edu

Rice supplies starch for energy and helps kibble bind and hold its shape. It is easy to digest, so it shows up often in foods sold for sensitive stomachs. White rice has little fiber, protein or vitamin content compared with whole grains. Pettings scores it 1 out of 5 because it takes space that meat and fat could fill.

Rice can carry more arsenic than other grains. An FDA risk assessment found that rice has a much higher arsenic concentration than cereals such as wheat and barley, because it is the only major cereal crop grown under flooded conditions. That FDA report looked at rice eaten by people, not pets. Pettings mentions arsenic on this page for the same reason.

Source: fda.gov

Usually, yes. When a label says rice with no other word, it generally means white, milled rice. Brown rice, brewers rice and rice flour are listed under their own names. Pettings files plain rice under its white rice page, scored 1 out of 5, and keeps separate pages for the other rice forms.

Pettings gives white rice 1 out of 5 and lists it as a starch or refined grain. It appears on 27 of the 149 dry cat foods we list. That score rates the ingredient by itself, and each food's page shows how the full recipe scores overall.