A study from consumer advocacy group Clean Label Project has found levels of heavy metals in cat food products from 62 brands as high as 99%.
The researchers measured levels of arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury and other contaminants. The group detected lead in 99% of the products, cadmium in 96% and arsenic in 94% of the products, Clean Label Project said in a release Friday.
The study looked at 31 dry cat food products, 40 wet cat food products and 29 air-dried or freeze-dried cat foods, and measured the level of contaminants in micrograms per 1,000 kilocalories. Kilocalories are written on nutrition labels as calories, according to a website run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Clean Label Project said in the study that it “compares contaminant levels across products—it does not determine whether a specific product will cause harm to a cat.”
The researchers found the products with most contaminants had much higher levels than other products. Foods with the highest levels of lead were 3.5 times greater than the amounts found in the products with the lowest levels, with dry food having around 3 times as much lead as the other cat food types.
The source of a cat food’s protein also made a difference. Clean Label Project said nearly 85% of cat foods containing poultry met its standards, compared to just over a quarter of fish and seafood-containing products. The fish and seafood products had 18 times the amount of mercury and 2.5 times the amount of cadmium compared to non-seafood products.
When isolated to just wet cat foods, products containing fish or seafood had 28 times more mercury compared to those made with other proteins, Clean Label Project said. The group noted that marine life used to make those products can naturally accumulate both cadmium and mercury.
The herbicide glyphosate showed up more in cat foods that contained plant matter, appearing in 37% of all products, and AMPA, a chemical created when glyphosate is broken down, appeared in 12% of studied products, Clean Label Project said.
One pet food industry group questioned the study’s methodology and the standard that the group used to measure whether a cat food product was up to snuff.
The Pet Food Institute, a trade association for the industry, said in a release Friday that “it is unclear whether this research underwent scientific or veterinarian review, or how or why Clean Label Project’s proprietary methodology differs from industry and regulatory body standards.”
In addition, the trade association said that, because the study only used one batch of each product, the variance limits how concrete a conclusion can be drawn from the data.
The Pet Food Institute also said that “the mere presence of a metal does not indicate harm. As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has noted, whether a metal is harmful depends on multiple factors, including the level and duration of exposure.”
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