Tuna / Fish In General Really That Bad?

I've been looking for a new brand of food for my cat and I just started reading about how bad tuna and fish in general can be! Maya loves fish. Her favorite flavor of food contains fish. I give her a bit of tuna every day (Tuna Loin by Applaws Cat Treat Whole Tuna Loin - Applaws US ); I crush up her pills and mix it in and she licks the bowl clean. I use it as an "appetizer" so I know she's getting her meds. After she eats the tuna, she gets her regular (wet) food. But she grazes during the day so if I put it in her regular food she might not get the full dose when she needs to.

Is it really that bad???

Hi!
Tuna can be a problem, in part because of the mercury that ocean fish ingest.

Whether cats are able to expel it, I don't know but I have had to take the approach that as long as my cat is consuming other additional foods that don't contain fish, he'll be ok.
Like you, I don't have a lot of choice either, my boy is 13 and I've had to make a couple of big compromises with his diet to keep his weight up (he's otherwise healthy).

You could look into a brand of tuna called Safecatch - they have a low sodium variety as well.

I think if you feed her the Applaws as an appetizer with the meds, that’s better than her not getting all the meds. If you feed it everyday, maybe limit her favorite tuna flavor of actual food to once or twice per week? There’s definitely a balance, but I think it’s fone to give the daily treats.

I don't know either. you read a lot about it, but i don't have the answers either. I would say if its the best or only way to get her to take her meds i would keep using it.
My little white cat will only eat almo nature salmon and apple for wet food, the only one. so she gets a can for breakfast. She then eats Dr. Elseys chicken dry the rest of the day. Do i wish she would eat other wet? Yes. But for years she would eat no wet, until the almo nature. So i dont know, i let her eat it so that she gets some wet.

Catinfo.org, written by vet Dr. Lisa Pierson, sums up the problems with fish here -- the page is very, very long so just search "fish" on the page until you get to the list of fish issues. My biggest problem with fish is the apparent link to hyperthyroidism.

Our cats like fish, too, but I only feed them one small can of fishy food a week (they split it) and it's always something from Weruva that lists chicken before fish. Funk in the Trunk, for example, is a big favorite, and it has chicken broth, chicken, then tuna. Goldie Lox, another favorite, has chicken before two kinds of fish (tuna and salmon) so may have more fish than chicken over all but at least it has enough chicken to make it the first ingredient. Those Weruva Cats in the Kitchen foods have a pretty strong fish smell so might be good for scaling back on fish for fish-loving cats. With small amounts of fish like those, I'm probably almost as concerned about the relatively high carbs in the first of those foods than about the quantity of fish in the second!