Overview
Awan and colleagues bought 96 potato-, corn- and mixed-based snack products in District Nowshera, Pakistan, and measured lead, cadmium, chromium and copper by AAS. Only pooled ranges and means across all 96 snacks are printed; potato-only results are not given.
Key numbers
- Lead 0.057 to 0.422 mg/kg, mean 0.214 ± 0.094 mg/kg (Results, p. 246).
- Cadmium 0.004 to 0.045 mg/kg, mean 0.012 ± 0.009 mg/kg (Results, p. 246).
- Chromium 2.137 to 2.328 mg/kg, mean 2.211 ± 0.047 mg/kg (Results, p. 246).
Methods (brief)
Convenience sampling, nitric/perchloric acid digestion and AAS. No detection limits, blanks, reference materials or weight basis are reported. Group comparisons are given as p-values with figure-only values.
Evidence Fitness
A reasonable sample count but pooled results only and no QA; the narrow chromium range is odd. Peer review is unverified, and the printed DOI is carried as an access URL only. For cream-of-potato-soup this is a proxy: it measures packaged potato and corn snacks, not soup.