Alam et al. 2022 - Lead in branded and nonbranded powdered spices from Dhaka

Alam et al. measured lead in 72 powdered spice samples collected from three local markets in Dhaka city, Bangladesh. The sample set covered cumin powder, red pepper chili powder, turmeric powder, and coriander powder, split between branded and nonbranded market items. Lead was quantified by flame atomic absorption spectrometry after hot-plate digestion. The highest source-stated lead range was in nonbranded turmeric powder, below 0.27 to 37.29 mg/kg; branded turmeric also reached 13.83 mg/kg. The paper reports that about 90% of samples were within the Bangladesh Standard maximum allowable limit, but the nonbranded red pepper and turmeric estimated daily intakes exceeded the maximum tolerable daily intake comparator used by the authors.

Key numbers

Source-stated lead ranges by spice category

The abstract gives the clearest complete per-spice ranges for lead, in mg/kg on the spice-as-sold powder basis.

Directional findings reported by the authors

• The average branded-spice Pb concentrations decreased in the order turmeric powder, coriander powder, cumin powder, red pepper powder.
• The corresponding nonbranded ordering placed turmeric powder highest, followed by cumin powder and red pepper powder, then coriander powder.
• The paper states that nonbranded items had slightly higher Pb than branded items except for coriander powder.
• The highest consumer-intake contribution came from turmeric powder in both branded and nonbranded categories. The lowest intake contribution was from branded cumin powder and nonbranded coriander powder.
• The estimated daily intake exceeded the authors’ maximum tolerable daily intake comparator only for nonbranded red pepper and nonbranded turmeric.

Exposure calculations reported in the source

The extracted table text reports these estimated daily intake entries for branded and nonbranded spice groups. Units are as printed by the paper’s EDI/THQ table; downstream use should return to the PDF table before treating them as occurrence values.

Methods (brief)

The authors collected the four powdered spice types from local markets in Dhaka city and separated the samples into branded and nonbranded categories. Samples were acid-digested on a hot plate and analyzed on a Varian AA240FS flame atomic absorption spectrometer. The paper states that freshly prepared standards were used for calibration, the digestion method was validated and optimized, and recovery was 90-110%. The measured analyte is total lead as Pb; no other metals were measured.

The source reports concentrations in mg/kg of spice powder. The wiki treats these values as dry/as-sold powdered spice values because the study matrices are powdered spices and no reconstitution or wet-weight conversion is described.

Implications

Certification: This source provides Bangladesh-market occurrence data for Pb in powdered spices. It is most relevant to spice/condiment routing, especially turmeric and cumin, but it should not be pooled silently with US-market spice data without a jurisdiction and market-basis decision.

Courses: Useful as a regional-market example of branded vs nonbranded spice contamination, with turmeric acting as the highest-Pb spice in both categories and nonbranded products generally higher than branded products.

App: Adds a Bangladesh retail-market signal for Pb in powdered cumin, red pepper, turmeric, and coriander. The source does not identify consumer brands and should be used as category-level evidence only.

Microbiome: Not addressed.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• spices
• herbs-and-spices
• cumin
• turmeric
• spices
• condiments-general

Verification notes

• The PDF is a Research Square preprint posted September 22, 2022, with DOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2087533/v1 and CC BY 4.0 license text in the PDF. The wishlist audit also contained skip rows for a later published DOI candidate, 10.1007/s12011-022-03553-4; this source page is based on the actual PDF in the auto-fetched folder and uses the DOI printed in that PDF.
• The full Table 2 extraction is not clean enough to reconstruct every individual sample cell without visual PDF review, so the Key numbers section uses the complete lead ranges stated in the abstract and body narrative. This is a source-ingest limitation, not a reason to drop the source, because the PDF provides extractable concentration ranges and category-level occurrence findings.
• matrices: [spices] is used rather than powdered-spices or a basis label. The source basis is powdered spice as sold; basis is documented in the Key numbers and Methods sections instead of being placed in frontmatter matrices.
• Audit subagent (2026-06-02) returned QUARANTINE because the first ingest mislabeled the source table’s carcinogenic-risk (CR) values as target-hazard-quotient (THQ) values. The exposure table now carries separate THQ and CR columns from the source table.
• Speciation is straightforward: lead is reported as Pb only. No arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel, chromium, tin, aluminum, uranium, or antimony values are measured in this source.
• The source has category labels for branded and nonbranded products but does not disclose consumer brand names. The page therefore remains brand-firewall compliant.

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.