Overview
Bedoya-Perales and colleagues collected 160 potatoes and their soils across four altitude bands in Moquegua, a copper-mining department of southern Peru, and measured nine metals by ICP-MS plus pesticide residues. Lowland potatoes carried more arsenic, chromium, nickel and aluminum; modern cultivars generally carried more metals than native ones. Mean lead was below the 0.1 mg/kg limit except in one agricultural zone.
Key numbers
- All 160 samples: lead 0.006 to 0.215 mg/kg, arsenic 0.01 to 0.25 mg/kg, cadmium 0.001 to 0.048 mg/kg (Section 3.3, p. 27).
- Chala and Yunga (lowland) mean arsenic 0.065 mg/kg vs Suni (highland) 0.012 mg/kg (Table 2, p. 27).
- Agricultural zone 4 mean lead 0.135 mg/kg, the only zone above 0.1 mg/kg (Table 4, p. 29).
Methods (brief)
Edible portion, skin and pulp together, analysed by ICP-MS (EPA 200.3/6010B) in an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratory; soils by ICP-OES. Censored results were handled with log-normal maximum-likelihood methods. Detection limits and full descriptive statistics are in supplementary tables that were not available.
Evidence Fitness
Large field sample with stratification by altitude and cultivar, but weight basis and reference-material QA are not reported, and supplementary tables are missing. Raw unpeeled potato from a mining region is a proxy for cream-of-potato-soup and root-vegetable-purees, so those pages are not linked.