If you’ve got a cat, there’s a good chance you scooped a little lead into its bowl this morning.
That’s not a guess. A nonprofit called Clean Label Project bought 100 cat foods from 62 brands and sent them to an accredited lab. Lead showed up in 99 of them. Cadmium turned up in 96%, arsenic in 94%.
The group screened for more than 122 contaminants in all, from heavy metals to pesticides to plastic chemicals. You can read the full results in its cat food study.
Here’s what bothers me most. There’s no federal limit telling pet food companies how much is too much.
In a 2019 report, the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine acknowledged it hadn’t set any formal limits or guidance on heavy metals in pet and livestock feed.
The Clean Label Project report notes that most existing guidelines were written with livestock in mind — not a 15-year-old housecat.
The pet food industry pushes back. The Pet Food Institute told CNN that manufacturers use safety programs including supplier checks and testing, and its CEO, Elise Fennig, said owners should feel confident the food is safe.
Maybe so. But your cat eats the same thing day after day, year after year. Small exposures add up when the menu never changes.
And don’t assume a fancy label buys you safety. The Clean Label Project found that pricier, premium-sounding food isn’t necessarily healthier.
The good news? The study points to fixes that don’t require a bigger pet budget. Here are five.
1. Go easy on the fish flavors
This was the biggest gap in the whole study. Fish and seafood foods averaged roughly 18 times the mercury of foods made with other proteins, and about 2.5 times the cadmium.
The wet seafood varieties were the worst of the bunch. They had nearly 28 times the mercury of wet foods built on other meats, especially poultry.
Measured against the group’s own purity standard, the scoreboard is lopsided. About 85% of poultry-based foods passed. Only about 26% of fish and seafood foods did.
That doesn’t mean every fish food is loaded with mercury. Molly Hamilton, Clean Label Project’s executive director, told CNN results depend on how carefully each manufacturer tests. But if your cat eats tuna or salmon every single day, rotate in chicken or turkey.
2. Mix some wet food into a dry-only diet
Kibble had roughly triple the lead found in wet or air-dried formulas. The lab compared them per 1,000 calories, so this isn’t a trick of water weight.
You don’t have to throw out the bag. Replacing even part of your cat’s dry food with wet food cuts the share of calories coming from the highest-lead format.
There’s a trade-off, and you should know it. Canned and pouched foods ran about five times higher in DEHP — a plastic chemical linked to hormone disruption — than bagged food. Nearly half of all products tested, 48 of 100, contained some.
So the answer isn’t all wet or all dry. It’s variety.
3. Count the plants on the label
Cats are carnivores, but plenty of cat foods are padded with plant ingredients. That matters because of glyphosate, the weedkiller, which the lab found in 37% of products.
According to the study, every extra plant ingredient in the top 10 on the label went with roughly 40% more glyphosate. The report’s advice: Be wary of long lists of plant “filler” ingredients.
That’s a 30-second check you can do in the store aisle, and it costs nothing.
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4. Don’t buy the first ingredient
Pet food marketers know you read the first ingredient and stop. “Real salmon!” sells.
But in 35 of the 100 products, the top 10 held more ingredients from some other category than from the one listed first. Translation: Behind a salmon headline, the fish may be outnumbered.
Read the whole top 10 before you pay for the marketing on the front of the bag.
5. Rotate foods, and make the company prove it tests
Since your cat eats the same food every day, switching among a few brands and proteins spreads the risk around. Hamilton told CNN that chicken isn’t perfect either — it scored better on mercury and cadmium but worse on lead and herbicides.
“It’s a whack-a-mole situation — which contaminant do you want to whack?” Hamilton said.
That’s exactly why the companies should be doing the testing, not you.
Call or email the manufacturer and ask two questions: Do you test finished products for heavy metals and other contaminants, and how often? A company that does it routinely will be happy to tell you. One that dodges is telling you something, too.
Three companies — Bixbi, Freshpet and Smalls — have cat foods certified by Clean Label Project. Keep in mind that brands apply for that certification, so treat it as one data point rather than a blanket endorsement.
The bottom line
Pet owners spend serious money on their animals. We recently broke down what your pet is really costing you, and food is a bill you pay every single day.
With that kind of money on the line, you deserve to know what’s in the bowl. Until regulators set limits, the best protection is cheap: fewer fish dinners, less kibble-only feeding, fewer plant fillers, a closer read of the label and a pointed question for the manufacturer.
Your cat can’t read the label. You can.
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