Heavy metals in cat food and the death of nuance

Clean Label Project’s latest report on contaminants found in tested cat food, and its subsequent handling by non-industry media, poke at a constant sore spot when it comes to the pet industry and consumer trust.

BY Lindsay Beaton, founder/principal
Beaton Path Communications LLC

Cat food was the focus of a recent Clean Label study on various contaminants in pet food. | Laura Chouette, Unsplash

At 2:50 p.m. on Thursday I got a text from my father. It was a screenshot of an online local news post: “Cat food investigation finds toxic contaminants across nearly all brands.” His simple message as the co-owner (with my mother) of four cats: “What?”

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the pet food industry will end up defending itself against what amounts to a clickbait-style headline and a lack of nuance, so first let’s address the headline’s claim. For that, we need to go to the source, the Clean Label Project (CLP), and their recently published (October 2, 2026) Cat Food Category Report. The report, according to CLP, “presents key findings from the analysis of 100 cat food products representing 62 brands, for more than 122 industrial and environmental contaminants and toxins. This study is designed as a category benchmark, providing a comparative assessment of contaminant levels among products currently available to consumers.”

It’s not research’s fault

Now, I’m going to say up front that I have no intention of blaming CLP for news outlets’ inability to thoughtfully report on CLP’s research. Upon reading the study myself, I found it to contain everything I’d want from a layperson-accessible scientific report: methodology, limitations, disclaimers and explanations where appropriate, clear charts and graphs, easily understandable language, and as straightforward a presentation of results as one could wish. The first three lines of the report even state CLP’s mission and goals, ensuring the reader knows exactly where the researching entity stands on the data it’s about to present.

Does CLP have an agenda? Of course. Does that automatically negate any research they do? As I’ve said for years, who do people expect to do research on pet food — the automotive industry?

So, on to the study itself and where the headline my father sent me came from. The very first key finding in the executive summary is the one all the media outlets have glommed on to: “Heavy metals are nearly universally present in cat food.” Even if the phrase “heavy metals” wasn’t already primed to set off alarms in people’s heads, combining it with “universally present” would, which is why the headlines out there are:

• Heavy metals found in 99% of cat foods tested in new study – USA Today

• Toxic chemicals found in most tested cat foods, new investigation finds – WCNC Charlotte (North Carolina)

• Heavy metals in cat food: Safer brands as study examines toxic materials – Newsweek (worth noting that the clickable headline that takes you to their article asks, "Does your cat food contain metal?")

• Cat food investigation finds heavy metals, pesticides and plastic chemicals – CNN

Let’s not be coy. These headlines are going to be all that a good chunk of news consumers get out of the study. Most will never click the headline to find out what the context is, and of those who do only a small subset will seek out the actual CLP report to digest the information for themselves. If I’m being totally honest, those most likely to read the report are people like me (industry types) or those pet owners who have turned being educated on the subject of their animals into a superpower. And if I only read that headline, as the owner of three cats myself, my response would be very similar to my father’s: “What?”

The black and white of modern news

Here’s where the lack of nuance comes into play. My extensive journalism experience has put me in a constant state of anxiety these days, because responsible reporting has been throttled in favor of getting eyes on a piece of content nownownow. For headline writers, that means making everything sound scandalous, because readers are numb to anything else. So a report on comparative research of various potential toxins in cat food very easily becomes a testimony that your pet is going to die if they eat cat food with fish in it.

Is this what CLP says? No. They do report that their research found “protein source matters more than food format” (84.8% of poultry products met CLP’s overall standards established in their methodology — different, it must be noted, than current regulatory standards — while 25.7% of fish and seafood products did) and “after accounting for whether products were wet vs. dry, fish and seafood products had about 18x more mercury than other products.” Of course, this bears paying attention to by the pet food industry, particularly those who have seafood formulas:

• Are pet food companies ensuring that their own product safety testing is in order?

• Do the “safe” levels of mercury in food established by a regulatory entity make sense for cat food in particular?

• Can companies provide validated assurances to pet owners who come looking for answers?

These are valid questions for brands to ask themselves internally and, if satisfactory answers are not immediate, to fix ASAP. At the same time, the study’s results don’t mean all seafood-based cat products should be taken off the shelves immediately.

There are two other focuses in the report that every media outlet highlighted: lead levels (99 out of the 100 cat foods tested had lead in them, and protein source didn’t seem to matter; rather it was the format of the food that seemed to affect how much lead appeared in the final product) and herbicide residue (specifically glyphosate, a common herbicide for plants; perhaps unsurprisingly the more plant-based ingredients there were in the cat diet tested, the higher the glyphosate levels). Of course, a lot got lost from the study to the media reports, meaning a good chunk of news consumers who came across related news items probably expect their animals to drop from lead poisoning any day now.

The fallout for pet food

What would happen in an ideal world? The report would go straight to the cat food segment of the industry, particularly the brands tested, where researchers for each relevant brand could look at the results, ask some questions of their own (What are the exact standards by which CLP determined if the levels of various contaminants found are relevant, and how exactly do those compare to current regulations?) and proceed accordingly. Research should always be welcomed, if with reservations; the more safety data the industry has, the more it can do what’s best for animals.

However, the fact that this report left the industry (and I’m not saying it shouldn’t have) made things more complicated the second a mainstream media reporter got hold of it. Media literacy is at an all-time low, and scientific literacy in particular has never been great to begin with. That means consumers are at the mercy of whoever wrote the articles they read, and if said articles don’t provide the study’s limitations up top (only a single batch used for each of the 100 brands tested, results help up against CLP’s standards rather than current regulatory standards, etc.), then it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever get mentioned in the larger conversation.

The complex nature of the industry-consumer communication pipeline persists, and when research like CLP’s comes out it’s bound to raise hackles. The only way through is forward, though, and the pet industry should continue to strive for the safest, most nutritious food that it can provide — and as always, be ready to provide answers for any consumer questions that come up.

Interested in more pet industry insights? Sign up for our weekly newsletter!