toxic metals like arsenic, cadmium and lead; as well as process contaminants such as acrylamide.

Overview

This source page is a mechanical bulk-ingest record for a PDF in the research-pulls corpus. It preserves source-level identity, routeable product/analyte scope, and exact extracted numeric lines for later human or fresh-context audit. It does not derive HMTc thresholds, percentiles, or brand-by-brand comparisons.

Key numbers

The worker extracted the full PDF text with layout preservation twice and compared extraction hashes before commit. The following lines are copied from numeric/table-bearing regions of the PDF and retain the source units and wording where legible:

EFSA sampling report (2016) on pesticides demonstrates that 96% of samples analysed were within
rates among the positive samples identified and maximum levels in raw grains as 55% and 1642 µg/kg
for aflatoxins, 29% and 1164 µg/kg for ochratoxin A, 61% and 71,121 µg/kg for fumonisins, 58% and
41,157 µg/kg, for deoxynivalenol, and 46% and 3049 µg/kg for zearalenone (31). It is not reported if
incidence rates among the positive samples identified and maximum levels in raw grains as 55% and
bran intact, can have up to 80% more arsenic than white rice (53). Assessments by EFSA have concluded
10 mg/kg. In addition, lead is used in various industrial applications and can thereby be introduced
compartments of the grain. In a case report from Albania, lead in flour was 325 ± 18 ppm, while in the
bran it was 370 ± 22 ppm. The level in flour was sufficient to result in ~0.42 ± 0.05 ppm in the blood
The levels of mercury in the earth’s crust are usually around 0.02 mg/kg. Like arsenic, this element
Taking the FAO number of approximately 25% of food crops being affected by fungi, the loss of
can be viewed as considerably greater than that for meat, milk or fruit and vegetables (Table 2) (64).
Table 2. Percent contribution to energy, macronutrient and fibre intake of UK adults aged 19–64 years.
Fruit, vegetables & salad vegetables 9 7 6 11 28
In the NDNS, for energy alone, cereal and cereal products contributed approximately 2% to 3.5%
Table 3. Comparison of regulatory guidance in the EU and US for foods for human consumption concerning (i) maximum levels of total mycotoxins permitted;
flour with fat content < 2.25%, dry weight basis)
mycotoxin production. In general, moulds grow at a temperature range of 10 ◦ C to 40 ◦ C, above 70%
high carbon dioxide concentrations >80% (92). In contrast, mitigation of acrylamide formation is
bread, reduction in process temperature and oven speed reduced acrylamide by approx. 75% (93).
gas at higher concentrations (500 or 1000 ppm) with longer exposure time (24 hours) has been found
the endosperm, hence 50–80% of the phytonutrients and minerals get lost during this step. Table 4
Table 4. Nutritional compositions of different whole grain and refined grains, per 100 g *.
the kefir grains adsorbed 82 to 100% of aflatoxin B1, zearalenone, and ochratoxin A, when cultivated
supplemental magnesium (40 mg/kg body weight) led to 30% percent reduction in cadmium retention
ca. 90% of the cadmium provided in the diet (116). Additional in vitro studies show that dietary fibres
of 70 mg/kg body weight over 28 days) while being exposed intragastrically to cadmium chloride,
somewhat (126). Rice grain type appears to impact somewhat, with a 40% decrease in arsenic content
50% were reported for parboiled and brown rice (127). Of note, iron, folate, niacin and thiamin contents
were also reduced by 50–70% for the polished and parboiled varieties, but significantly less with the
removes 50 to 80% of phytonutrients from whole grains. The observational and preclinical evidence
1. Luis, S.; Andréia, B. From field to table: A review on the microbiological quality and safety of wheat-based

Methods (brief)

EFSA sampling report (2016) on pesticides demonstrates that 96% of samples analysed were within
rates among the positive samples identified and maximum levels in raw grains as 55% and 1642 µg/kg
incidence rates among the positive samples identified and maximum levels in raw grains as 55% and
fibre) (96). Thus, milling makes the nutrients more available for digestion. During wet processing
hair samples from 168 Taiwanese patients with blackfoot disease (blackfoot is a form of peripheral
1. Veldman, A.; Meijs, J.A.C.; Borggreve, G.J.; Heeres-van der Tol, J.J. Carry-over of aflatoxin from cows’ food
and cerebrospinal fluid by mass spectrometry. Methods Enzymol. 2017, 586, 413–431. (PubMed)
1. Raab, A.; Feldmann, J.; Meharg, A.A. Levels of Arsenic in Rice: The Effects of Cooking; Food Standards Agency:

Implications

This page makes the source discoverable for category-level evidence routing. Values remain source-native and should be used only with the stated matrix, species, basis, geography, and censoring context from the paper. The page does not convert total mercury to methylmercury or use total arsenic as inorganic arsenic.

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Verification notes

Identity check: DOI, raw handle, candidate cite-key, and SHA-256 were compared against existing wiki/sources/ pages before creation.
Full-PDF read: pdftotext -layout was run on the full PDF twice; extracted text hashes matched before the page was written.
Numeric verification: numeric/table-bearing lines were selected mechanically from the verified extraction and preserved without unit conversion or rounding.
Brand firewall: the worker skips PDFs when extracted numeric lines appear brand/manufacturer-sensitive; this page contains category-level or species-level evidence only.
HMTc firewall: no threshold, percentile, pass/fail, clean/dirty, or certification math is stated.

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and 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	Change	Description
b01ec52c	2026-08-04	major	2 sections added
d49e450f	2026-08-03	major	5 sections added; narrative text revised