Manganese
Manganese is an essential element required at low doses for connective-tissue formation, bone development, and several enzyme cofactor roles. At excessive intake, manganese is a documented neurodevelopmental concern, particularly during the prenatal-and-early-childhood window when blood-brain-barrier permeability is highest. The neurodevelopmental dose-response is the reason manganese appears in the heavy-metals-and-infant-food literature even though it is an essential nutrient, not in the HMTc 8-metal toxic-metal panel.
The principal dietary sources of manganese are whole grains, legumes, nuts, leafy vegetables, and some teas. Manganese in drinking water has been associated with childhood neurodevelopmental endpoints in epidemiological studies; this is a regulated concern in some jurisdictions (the EPA secondary MCL for manganese is anchored on aesthetic effects rather than health, but health-based advisory thresholds exist).
For infant formula and baby food, manganese is included in compositional requirements similarly to zinc — regulators set minimum and maximum permitted manganese contents per 100 kcal. Astolfi et al. 2021 evaluated manganese intake from powdered infant formula and reported formula means above the minimum compositional requirement and below the maximum (astolfi2021-italy-powdered-infant-formula-elements).
The Heavy Metal Index carries this page as a cross-metal context destination for source pages whose elemental surveys include manganese alongside HMTc analytes. The HMTc certification protocol does not set manganese thresholds; manganese values in source pages are recorded for completeness but do not feed into the certification pipeline.
Ufelle & Barchowsky 2021 discusses manganese in chapter-level metal transport, excretion, and essential-metal context as cross-metal toxicology background.
Sources
Page history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page. 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 | Description |
|---|---|---|
| b0f3d38 | 2026-06-12 | batch | corpus rescreen b04 old terminal skips |