Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are starchy root vegetables used in many grain-free cat foods. FDA investigated reports of dilated cardiomyopathy, mostly in dogs, in pets eating foods high in peas, lentils, other legume seeds or potatoes, including sweet potatoes. FDA found that 93 percent of reported products had peas or lentils and a far smaller share contained potatoes. FDA did not establish a cause. If your cat has heart disease or another condition, ask your veterinarian.

Source: fda.gov

Sweet potatoes in cat food are the cooked, dried and ground roots of the sweet potato plant. They supply starch, fiber and beta-carotene, and they are a common starch in grain-free recipes. Pettings notes that they are starch-heavy, so many foods marketed as grain-free still contain a large share of carbohydrate.

It is only a naming choice. Manufacturers write the ingredient in the singular or the plural, and both mean the same root vegetable. Pettings keeps a page for each spelling so every label matches. Sweet potatoes appears on 25 of the 149 dry foods we list, more often than the singular spelling, and both score 2 out of 5.

Pettings scores both 2 out of 5. Tufts veterinary nutritionists describe sweet potatoes as very good sources of potassium and beta-carotene, and sweet potatoes carry somewhat more fiber. Both are starch-heavy roots, and adult cats have no specific dietary need for carbohydrate, so swapping one for the other changes little about how a cat food is built.

Source: sites.tufts.edu

Pettings scores sweet potatoes 2 out of 5 and lists it as a grain, potato or other carb source. We found it on 25 of the 149 dry cat foods in our list. The ingredient score is separate from a food's overall score, which you can see on each food's page.