Did you ever check if your pet food contains any sweeteners? Aside form the fact that added sweeteners (including honey!) have no place in your pet’s regular food, these additives can be contaminated as the following summary by Lyn Henshew, MD demonstrates:

Jan. 29, 2009 — Some foods and drinks rich in high-fructose corn syrup contain detectable levels of mercury, a new report shows. The report, published on the web site of the Minneapolis-based
nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), shows detectable levels of mercury in 17 out of 55 tested products rich in high-fructose corn syrup. The new report comes from researchers including David Wallinga, MD, director of the IATP’s food and health program. They bought 55
products that list high-fructose corn syrup first or second on their list of ingredients, which means high-fructose corn syrup was a leading ingredient in those products. Wallinga’s team sent samples of those products to a commercial lab, which checked the levels of total mercury in each sample.

“Overall, we found detectable mercury in 17 of 55 samples, or around 31%,” write Wallinga and colleagues.

Here is the list of those products:

Quaker Oatmeal to Go bars
Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauce
Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup
Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce
Nutri-Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars
Manwich Gold Sloppy Joe
Market Pantry Grape Jelly
Smucker’s Strawberry Jelly
Pop-Tarts Frosted Blueberry
Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup
Wish-Bone Western Sweet & Smooth Dressing
Coca-Cola Classic: no mercury found on a second test
Yoplait Strawberry Yogurt
Minute Maid Berry Punch
Yoo-hoo Chocolate Drink
Nesquik Chocolate Milk
Kemps Fat Free Chocolate Milk

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