Plant Milks (Almond, Oat, Coconut, Other Non-Soy/Non-Rice)
This page is HMTc Category 5 row 5. It remains a clean-benchmark candidate, but the current evidence is not strong enough to use it as a clean comparator without more occurrence extraction.
Heavy Metal Index pages are written for several audiences at once. Each entry point below names where to start if you are reading this page with a specific question in mind.
- Brand legal and regulatory affairs
- Cherry-pick attack vectors on non-soy non-rice plant milks (almond, oat, coconut, cashew, etc.) typically center on cadmium and lead with high inter-variety variance. Source provenance and varietal disclosure are the defensive core. Compare with Plant Milks Rice Based for the within-pair sibling. The cited sources at the bottom of this page are the citations list, written to be quoted into a Daubert brief without further editing.
- Retailer quality and compliance
- The Federal / Regulatory Limits vs Field Findings section compares the applicable regulatory cap to cited field evidence on a like-for-like basis, with basis conversion shown when conversion is well-defined and a methodology anchor when speciation differs. The Literature Evidence Summary gives source count and confidence rating per analyte.
- Brand QA and product development
- Use the Lab Result Comparator to position a single lab value inside the cited literature. The comparator positions a single lab value inside the cited literature for non-soy non-rice plant milks.
- Regulators, journalists, and adversarial readers
- Every numeric claim on this page traces to a source page. The Evidence Governance note explains what this page is and is not (literature evidence, not HMT&C certification thresholds).
- HMT&C staff (internal)
- The threshold-selection arithmetic (percentile statistics, clean / dirty subcategory designation, CC eligibility) lives on the staff workbench snapshot at plant-milks-non-soy-non-rice, not on this public page.
| Field | Status |
|---|---|
| Row state | Early source coverage only |
| Best current source | marques2021-trace-elements-milks-plant-based-drinks |
| Computation readiness | Not computation-ready; table values need source review |
| Ingredient routing | plant-milk, almond, oat, coconut |
| HMTc use | Hold as clean-benchmark hypothesis, not clean-benchmark evidence |
Federal / Regulatory Limits vs Field Findings
This is the fast comparison view for standards developers, regulators, retailers, brands, and legal teams. It shows the applicable federal or regulatory limit next to the current field-evidence state. It is not an HMTc pass/fail table; technical distributions remain in the evidence sections below.
| Metal | Federal / regulatory limit | Actual field finding | Decision read | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lead (Pb); mercury-total (tHg); uranium (U) | No federal product-specific limit loaded in this crosswalk. | Marques 2021 reports Pb detected in one non-organic oat drink and Hg/U non-detected in milks and plant-based drinks; numeric table extraction requires review. | Occurrence evidence only. Do not infer a federal exceedance or HMTc pass/fail result from this row. | marques2021-trace-elements-milks-plant-based-drinks |
Occurrence Evidence
marques2021-trace-elements-milks-plant-based-drinks measured almond, oat, rice, and soy drinks from the Spanish retail market. It supports routing and shows why non-soy/non-rice plant milks cannot simply be assumed clean, but it is not enough to populate thresholds.
Ingredient Handling
Finished oat or almond beverage values belong on this product row. Ingredient-only almond, oat, coconut, or plant-milk values belong on the linked ingredient pages if those sources are later promoted.
Literature Evidence Summary
The table below summarizes what the peer-reviewed and government literature cited on this page reports for heavy-metal concentrations in non-soy (cow milk-based) product. Values are pulled directly from cited sources without re-aggregation; pooling, percentile selection, and threshold math sit in the staff Standards Workbench rather than this public page.
Methodology rules for speciation, basis preservation, non-detect handling, and source pooling are stated in the Methodology section above and apply to every row below.
| Analyte | Subcategory | Reported concentration range | Detection rate | Applicable regulatory cap | Sources | Confidence | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Al | non-soy (cow milk-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| Ni | non-soy (cow milk-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| Cd | non-soy (cow milk-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| iAs | non-soy (cow milk-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| Pb | non-soy (cow milk-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
Sources
Auto-generated from source-page frontmatter. The “Used on this page for” column is populated by the orchestrator’s POPULATE-SOURCE-LEGEND action; pending entries appear as *[awaiting synthesis]*.
| # | Citation | Year | Type | Used on this page for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marques et al. 2021. Essential and Non-essential Trace Elements in Milks and Plant-Based Drinks, Biological Trace Element Research | 2021 | Peer-reviewed | ICP-MS survey of Pb, tHg, Ni, and U in retail cow milk, goat milk, and plant-based drinks (soy, almond, rice, oat) from Spain; Pb detected in one non-organic oat drink; primary occurrence source for the non-soy/non-rice plant-milk row |
CC candidate evidence map
| Analyte | Distribution sources (sample-level) | Summary sources | Total source count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pb | — | Marques 2021 (Pb detected in 1 non-organic oat drink composite) | 1 summary |
| Cd, tAs, iAs, MeHg, Al, Sn | — | — | 0 (Marques didn’t measure) |
| tHg | — | Marques 2021 (not detected baseline) | 1 summary |
| Ni | — | Marques 2021 (subset values pending source-table review) | 1 summary |
| Cr-VI | — | inference cascade from Hernandez/Saraiva chemistry (milk-like matrix) | 1 cascade |