Best Cat Food for Hairball Control

An occasional hairball is normal. Frequent ones usually are not — and the most useful thing to know is that hairballs are often a symptom rather than the problem itself.

Cats swallow hair when they groom, and trichobezoars form when too much hair arrives or the gut moves it along too slowly. Both halves of that have causes worth chasing. Cats with itchy skin, allergies or fleas over-groom, so more hair goes in. Cats with underlying digestive disease have altered gut motility, so less hair comes out. Cats also over-groom from stress or pain. A cat producing hairballs weekly is telling you something, and a hairball food treats the consequence rather than the cause.

Where diet does help, the type of fibre matters more than the amount. In the best controlled trial available, cats fed sugarcane fibre produced progressively fewer hairballs — and at the highest level, no large ones at all — while cats fed cellulose showed no significant improvement. So "high fibre" on a label is not the same claim as fibre that has been shown to work.

Regular brushing does as much as any food, especially for long-haired cats. The foods below are drawn from our database using hairball-control criteria, so you can compare fibre sources, ingredients and price side by side.