minerals and heavy metals in

Overview

This source page is a mechanical bulk-ingest record for a PDF in the research-pulls corpus. It preserves source-level identity, routeable product/analyte scope, and exact extracted numeric lines for later human or fresh-context audit. It does not derive HMTc thresholds, percentiles, or brand-by-brand comparisons.

Key numbers

The worker extracted the full PDF text with layout preservation twice and compared extraction hashes before commit. The following lines are copied from numeric/table-bearing regions of the PDF and retain the source units and wording where legible:

(n = 25) were evaluated. Analyses of protein, fat, and fiber were performed according to AOAC, and
18% of animals that took part in a survey in the United States and Australia were fed home-prepared diets as a
and cats from 55 countries and observed that more than 60% fed their pets home-prepared food as a part of the
that 95% of the recipes had at least one nutrient that did not meet requirements and 83.5% presented multiple
Table 1. Operational conditions of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) with
presented in Table 1. For the determination of antimony, arsenic, selenium, and mercury a hydride generator
tions of 100 mg/L for arsenic (As), aluminum (Al), boron (B), barium (Ba), beryllium (Be), calcium (Ca), cad-
uranium (U). Curves were prepared in a range of concentrations from 0.1 to 5 mg/L for Cu, Zn, Na and Mn, from
0.5 to 100 mg/L for Ca, P, Mg and K and from 0.001 to 2 mg/L for arsenic, Al, B, Ba, Be, Cd, Co, Cr, Fe, Hg, Ni, Pb,
allow chloride and iodine evaluation due to high ionization energy necessary, as less than 30% of atoms of both
NRC1 FEDIAF2 % below minimum (n)
Table 2. Results of macronutrient and mineral analyses (in 1000 kcal) of 75 home-prepared recipes for healthy
and 6.6% (n = 5/75) did not contain any animal products and were considered vegan. Of recipes intended for cats,
4.0% (n = 1/25) were vegetarian and 8.0% (n = 2/25) were vegan. As for cooking, 2.7% (n = 2/75) of recipes for
dogs and 20.0% (n = 5/25) for cats contained raw animal products, and the remaining diets had cooked animal
products. Only 20.0% (n = 15/75) of recipes for dogs indicated vitamin-mineral supplement as an ingredient, of
vitamin-mineral supplementation and 32.0% (n = 8/25) did not indicate any supplementation of minerals, amino
32.0%); whole egg (n = 20/75; 26.7%); skinless chicken breast (n = 19/75; 25.3%); and zucchini (n = 17/75; 22.7%).
40.0%); carrot (n = 8/25; 32.0%); skinless chicken breast (n = 8/25; 32.0%); and bovine liver (n = 7/25; 28.0%).
minerals recommended by NRC1 and FEDIAF2. When compared to NRC1, 84.0% (n = 63/75) of recipes for dogs
are listed in Table 2, and the results of recipes for cats are listed in Table 3. The complete list of results for all diets
can be found in Supplementary Tables S1 and S2. As for NRC1 maximum levels, none of the recipes for dogs
and one recipe for cats (4.0%) had levels of fat above 82.5 g/1000 kcal. When compared to FEDIAF2 maximum
recommended levels, one recipe for dogs (1.3%) had levels of calcium above 6.25 g/1000 kcal; none of the recipes
for dogs presented phosphorus levels above 4.0 g/1000 kcal; and 11 recipes for dogs (14.7%) and 5 recipes for cats
(20.0%) had calcium:phosphorus ratio above 2:1. The supply of nutrients was also evaluated for recipes for dogs
NRC1 FEDIAF2 % below minimum (n)
Table 3. Results of macronutrient and mineral analyses (in 1000 kcal) of 25 home-prepared recipes for healthy
detection limit of 0.001 mg/kg in any recipe (Table 4). Aluminum, chromium, mercury, lead, antimony, tin and
Table 4. Heavy metal concentration in recipes for dogs and comparison to maximum tolerable levels (MTL).
None of the diets supplied recommended levels of all nutrients evaluated, and more than 84.0% of diets presented
nutrient requirement tables, as the NRC1 considers diets with highly digestible and purified proteins, and energy
even lower MER of healthy adult dogs, with a mean value of 86.1 kcal/kg BW0.75. FEDIAF2 recommendations
Table 5. Heavy metal concentration in recipes for cats and comparison to maximum tolerable levels (MTL).
Germany, observed mean MER of 95 kcal/kg BW0.67, similar to recommendations of both NRC1 and FEDIAF2 of
els below recommendations was high, with more than 84.0% of diets presenting three or more nutrients below
Refined salt (n = 15) 0.20 0.483 0.12 0.670 0.55 0.034 0.39 0.150 0.33 0.231
Table 6. Correlation between ingredient inclusion in dry matter basis and heavy metal concentration in diets
al.26 suggested that the intake of a diet containing 5 g K/kg of diet and more than 40% of protein in a DM basis for
content of recipes for cats was 54% on a DM basis and mean potassium levels were 0.44%, which suggests that
tology, parakeratosis21. A study conducted in cats25 did not observe clinical signs in cats fed 15ppm of zinc, but
intake of 67ppm of this nutrient. There have been case reports of zinc deficiency in dogs that consumed diets with

Methods (brief)

spectrometry (ICP-OES). None of the diets supplied recommended levels of all nutrients evaluated, and
samples above the human maximum permitted levels. The authors also observed that all samples that presented
acquired. Preparation of 500 grams samples for recipes was done according to recipe’s instruction of ingredients,
Sample uptake rate (s) 30
Table 1. Operational conditions of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) with
Bromatological analyses. Samples were dehydrated in forced circulation oven at 55 °C for 72 hours39,40.
Mineral and heavy metal analyses. For mineral analyses, 200 mg of samples were put in 100 mL assay
samples were heated in hot plates until the reduction of half of the volume. Hot plates were then turned off and,
after cooling, 1 mL of perchloric acid (HClO4) was added to each tube. Samples were reheated until a sample size
of 2 mL was reached42. This digestion method was performed at the Multiuser Laboratory of Animal Nutrition
Close vessel microwave digestion was used to process samples for heavy metal analyses. Samples of 0.5 g of
to each sample. Tubes rested for 30 minutes and then 4.5 mL of ultrapure water was added. Tubes were then put
samples were heated for 20 minutes until 180 °C with radiofrequency power of 400 W; the second phase, samples
were heated for 10 minutes at 180 °C with radiofrequency power of 800 W. After this period, samples were left to
cool for 10 minutes. This digestion method was performed at the laboratory of Biorigin Brazil (Lençóis Paulista,
etry (ICP-OES (ICPE-9000, Shimadzu of Brazil, Barueri, SP, Brazil)) at the Multiuser Laboratory of Animal
(hydrideI CP, Elemental Scientific, Omaha, NE, United States) was coupled to the ICP-OES.
Heavy metal analyses. ICP-OES methodology allowed the evaluation of 15 different heavy metals in reci-

Implications

This page makes the source discoverable for category-level evidence routing. Values remain source-native and should be used only with the stated matrix, species, basis, geography, and censoring context from the paper. The page does not convert total mercury to methylmercury or use total arsenic as inorganic arsenic.

Wiki pages this source may touch

Verification notes

Identity check: DOI, raw handle, candidate cite-key, and SHA-256 were compared against existing wiki/sources/ pages before creation.
Full-PDF read: pdftotext -layout was run on the full PDF twice; extracted text hashes matched before the page was written.
Numeric verification: numeric/table-bearing lines were selected mechanically from the verified extraction and preserved without unit conversion or rounding.
Brand firewall: the worker skips PDFs when extracted numeric lines appear brand/manufacturer-sensitive; this page contains category-level or species-level evidence only.
HMTc firewall: no threshold, percentile, pass/fail, clean/dirty, or certification math is stated.

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.

Commit	Date	Change	Description
b01ec52c	2026-08-04	major	2 sections added
d49e450f	2026-08-03	major	5 sections added; narrative text revised