Seafood, wine, rice, vegetables, and other food items associated

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:

• controlling for age, sex, education, and race/ethnicity. Geometric mean THg was 0.89 μg/L (95%
• confidence interval (CI): 0.78, 1.02) (seafood consumers) and 0.31 μg/L (95% CI: 0.28, 0.34)
• associated with consumption of vegetables (35–38), grains (35,36,39), alcoholic beverages
• data (N=1919), did not complete the 24-hour dietary recall (N=608), or did not complete the
• dietary questionnaire (N=32); this leaves a total of N=7197. Those who were included in
• population (N=2135). Using the same criteria as above, there were 1614/2135 persons who
• whole blood inorganic mercury; however, >70% of values were below the limit of detection
• coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LOD=0.16 μg/L (THg), 0.12 μg/L (MeHg), and 0.05
• μg/g creatinine (UHg) (46). There were 573/7197 (8.0%) and 1302/7197 (18.1%) samples <
• there were 118/2135 (5.5%) samples < LOD. Values <LOD were replaced with LOD/√2 for
• Table 1). Our group classification was based on recommendations from WWEIA,
• means (95% confidence interval) are presented and natural log transformed variables are
• reference dose for MeHg is based on a cord blood total mercury measurement of 5.8 μg/L
• maternal blood Hg concentrations (48); using this ratio, 5.8 μg/L in cord blood would be
• equivalent to 3.4 μg/L in maternal blood. Therefore, we created variables to indicate whether
• whole blood THg or MeHg were >5.8 or >3.4 μg/L.
• below. Regression coefficients (95% confidence intervals) are reported.
• presented in Table 1. There was a significant difference in age between the two groups with
• Table 2. Mercury concentrations were significantly higher among seafood consumers versus
• seafood consumers (0.631); overall the MeHg/THg ratio was 0.766 (95% confidence
• interval: 0.727, 0.805). An estimated 3.8% of seafood consumers had THg higher than 5.8
• suggests roughly 7.7 million and 18.7 million persons have THg > 5.8 μg/L or > 3.4 μg/L,
• thresholds (Supplemental Table 2).
• foods within the past 24 hours are presented in Supplemental Table 3. For seafood
• consumers are presented in Supplemental Table 4. For non-seafood consumers, somewhat
• Tables 3–5 present results from regression models predicting mercury biomarkers among
• seafood and non-seafood consumers. Supplemental Table 5 presents the difference in all of
• was associated with the majority of foods included in the model (Table 3). Consumption of
• past 24 hours was associated with higher MeHg (Table 4). Consumption of fish or seafood
• as well as beans, nuts, or soy in the past 24 hours was associated with higher UHg (Table 5).
• mercury; wine was approaching statistical significance (p=0.085) (Table 3). Consumption of
• wine within the past 24 hours was significantly associated with higher MeHg (Table 4).
• dishes, red vegetables/leafy vegetables/vegetable oil, liquor within the past 24 hours; there
• Finland (35). Modeling studies in China have also suggested that leafy greens or vegetables
• for fish/shellfish and seafood (Tables 3, 4). Meanwhile, additional studies have quantified
• Supplemental Table 1). Additionally, there were a few food categories which we were
• UHg, see Supplemental Table 4) or they were too highly correlated with other food items.
• 38. Park S, Lee B-K. Strong positive associations between seafood, vegetables, and alcohol with blood
• 58. Rothenberg SE, Yin R, Hurley JP, Krabbenhoft DP, Ismawati Y, Hong C, et al. Stable Mercury
• 62. Kootbodien T, Mathee A, Naicker N, Moodley N. Heavy metal contamination in a school vegetable
• 64. Yu H, Li J, Luan Y. Meta-analysis of soil mercury accumulation by vegetables. Sci Rep. 2018
• 71. Cappon CJ. Uptake and speciation of mercury and selenium in vegetable crops grown on compost-

Methods (brief)

• noninstitutionalized civilians in order to obtain a representative sample of the United States
• sample size. Selected subpopulations are oversampled in order to increase the precision of
• utilized estimation procedures for survey samples. NHANES operates with approval from
• methylmercury data are available on the full examination sample. Prior to 2011,
• subsample of the eligible population. Different weights are needed for a subsample
• compared to the full population; however, if different weights are combined the sample
• would not reflect a representative sample of the United States. Thus, we limited this analysis
• limit (LOD) and therefore blood inorganic mercury is not used in the current analysis.
• Whole blood and urine samples were collected using standard procedures by trained study
• staff. Trace-free equipment was used for collection; blood samples were stored at −30°C or
• coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LOD=0.16 μg/L (THg), 0.12 μg/L (MeHg), and 0.05
• μg/g creatinine (UHg) (46). There were 573/7197 (8.0%) and 1302/7197 (18.1%) samples <
• LOD for THg and MeHg, respectively. Within the subsample of those assessed for UHg
• there were 118/2135 (5.5%) samples < LOD. Values <LOD were replaced with LOD/√2 for
• 1/3 subsample, analyses involving urinary mercury incorporated appropriate subsample
• In this cross-sectional analysis of a representative sample of the United States population,
• sample size available in NHANES, which increases that likelihood that even if some
• as recent food consumption is likely to be strongly represented in these biological samples.

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.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• baby-cereals-dry
• Fish — marine, non-predatory (sardines, anchovies, salmon, cod)
• Shellfish (shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, oysters, mussels)
• Root-Vegetable Purees
• teething-and-snacks
• Other cooking oils (canola, sunflower, coconut, avocado, sesame)
• Seaweed/kelp foods (nori, wakame, kombu, dulse — as food products)
• Mercury
• Mercury
• Cadmium
• Arsenic

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.