Abstract
Objectives: To examine the relative levels of heavy metals and arsenic content in commercial dog foods (arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury) of 51 over-the-counter maintenance or all-life-stage dry dog foods. All products were chosen and segregated based on meat sources (fish, poultry, red-meat—17 products from each category) as animal protein sources being the primary contaminated ingredient due to bioaccumulation.Methods: Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was performed on products that were classified as fish, red meat (beef, pork, venison, bison) or poultry (chicken, turkey, duck) based. A non-Gaussian data distribution for each heavy metal within category distribution led to non-parametric statistical testing and median (range) descriptive statistics. Comparison to average human consumption based on mg/megacalorie (Mcal)was also examined.Results: Based on caloric consumption, total arsenic and heavy metal consumption is higher in dogs than in humans; however chronic toxic exposure levels are highly unlikely. Fish-based diets had significantly higher arsenic, cadmium and mercury content than the poultry or red meat-based diets (p < 0.01). Red meat-based diets (beef, venison and bison) had higher lead concentrations than poultry and fish-based diets (p < 0.03).Clinical Significance: Based on the findings, commercial dog foods appear to be safe for chronic consumption and concentrations of the heavy metals were dependent on primary protein sources. Overall, poultry-based diets had relatively lower heavy metal and arsenic content than red meat and fish-based diets. Despite the safety of most pet foods occasional outliers for lead render some concern for chronic exposure based on other species toxicity data and a lack of data in dogs.
Highlights
Various ingredients, such as poultry, red meat, fish, grain, legumes, tubers and grains, are used as primary ingredients in contemporary pet food formulations
There are few studies measuring the toxic heavy metal contamination of pet foods, and the extent of the elemental exposure compared to humans, and the possibility of intoxication from chronic consumption of the diets were not evaluated [6, 21, 28,29,30]
Our study results suggest that dogs may be exposed to higher levels of these undesired heavy metals than humans; this does not indicate a higher risk of toxicity from pet foods as consumption is well below known chronic toxic exposure levels
Summary
Various ingredients, such as poultry, red meat, fish, grain, legumes, tubers and grains, are used as primary ingredients in contemporary pet food formulations. All of the trace minerals and heavy metals noted are not intended to be included in pet foods and higher consumption than environmentally normal likely originates from ingredients that were grown/exposed to environmental pollution and bioaccumulation over time [6, 7]. Due to their constantly increasing prevalence in nature, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury bioaccumulation of our aquatic environments leads to fish being the most problematic ingredient in the food chain [8, 9]. Many of these terrestrial animals (such as bison and venison) are farm raised and longer lived leading to potential contamination and these protein sources which are increasingly utilized as novel protein sources by the pet food industry [10]
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