Should You Be Worried About BPA in Your Dog’s Food?

Do you know what BPA is?

Processed foods, particularly processed pet foods, are packaged using a range of chemicals — and not all of them are harmful. So how do you know which ones are worth worrying about?

The best approach is to stay current with the research and follow your veterinarian's guidance. One chemical that gets brought up often in these conversations is BPA. Here's what it is, what the science actually shows, and what you can reasonably do about it.

What Is BPA?

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is an industrial chemical used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. Polycarbonate plastics show up in food and water containers (including some water bottles), while epoxy resins are commonly used to line the inside of metal food cans — including pet food cans — to keep the food from directly contacting the metal.

BPA can migrate from these linings and containers into food, and that transfer increases with heat, acidity, and fat content. That's part of why it's a good idea to avoid putting plastic in the microwave.

As of the FDA's most recent safety assessment, the agency's position is that BPA is safe at the levels currently found in foods. That said, the FDA has restricted BPA in specific products it considers higher-risk — it's no longer permitted in baby bottles, sippy cups, or infant formula packaging.

The picture isn't unanimous internationally, either: the European Food Safety Authority has taken a far more cautious stance, setting an allowable daily exposure limit thousands of times lower than the FDA's, based on its own review of the evidence. In other words, regulators looking at similar data have reached different conclusions — which is worth knowing if you're trying to decide how cautious to be.

Separately, a substantial body of human epidemiological research has found associations between higher BPA exposure and health issues including reproductive and developmental effects, metabolic changes, cardiovascular risk factors, and altered liver enzyme levels. These are population-level correlations from human studies, not proof that BPA causes these conditions in people — and they don't automatically tell us what happens in dogs, whose metabolism differs from ours in ways researchers don't fully understand yet (more on that below).

What Does the Research on Dogs Actually Show?

The dog-specific evidence here mostly traces back to one study: a 2016 University of Missouri investigation published in Science of the Total Environment. Researchers took 14 healthy dogs off their usual kibble and put them on one of two canned diets for two weeks — one of which was marketed as BPA-free.

The result: dogs' blood BPA levels rose nearly three-fold on both diets, including the one presumed to be BPA-free. The researchers also found that the increase correlated with changes in the dogs' gut microbiome.

A few important caveats the original coverage of this study didn't always mention:

• It was a small study (14 dogs) over a short period (two weeks) — it didn't test long-term exposure or long-term health outcomes.
• It shows correlation between canned food and rising BPA levels, not that BPA from the food caused any specific health problem in the dogs.
• To date, there isn't a large-scale, dog-specific study establishing a direct link between BPA and cancer or other diseases in dogs — most of what's cited for dogs is extrapolated from human and rodent research.
• It's also nearly a decade old at this point, and doesn't appear to have been followed up with a larger dog-specific trial.

One more wrinkle: in rodents, BPA that isn't metabolized tends to accumulate in the body over repeated exposure. In humans and primates, BPA is processed and excreted relatively efficiently, so it doesn't build up as readily. It's still not well established how dogs clear BPA from their systems, which is one reason researchers describe dogs as potentially useful “sentinels” for understanding human exposure risks, too.

What Does This Mean for Your Dog?

Given the limited evidence specific to dogs, this is a “reasonable precaution” situation rather than a “proven danger” one. If you'd rather limit your dog's BPA exposure while more research is done, a few practical steps:

• If you buy canned food, know that “BPA-free” labeling isn't a guarantee — as the Missouri study showed, a product marketed as BPA-free still showed a comparable rise in BPA levels, likely due to substitute chemicals with similar properties.
• Store dry food by keeping it in its original bag, placed inside a separate storage container, rather than pouring kibble directly into a plastic bin.
• Stainless steel or ceramic bowls are a reasonable alternative to plastic bowls, particularly since scratched or worn plastic can leach more readily and also harbors bacteria.
• Choose pet toys and feeding accessories with the same general caution you'd apply to plastic products for kids.

Veterinary and consumer guidance on storage containers generally agrees that either plastic or stainless steel is fine for storing dry kibble as long as the container is airtight and kept clean — airtightness matters more for freshness than the container material itself does for BPA exposure.