Overview
Bielecka and colleagues bought 242 gluten-free cereal and pseudocereal products in Białystok and online in spring 2021 and measured arsenic, cadmium and lead by ICP-MS and mercury by amalgamation AAS. Tables 1 to 5 give mean ± SD, range, median and quartiles for each product subgroup. Buckwheat products had the most cadmium and maize products the most lead.
Key numbers
- Buckwheat products (n = 61): cadmium 48.35 ± 23.31 µg/kg, lead 35.44 ± 56.93 µg/kg (Table 1, p. 4).
- Maize products (n = 59): lead 74.52 ± 24.02 µg/kg; popcorn lead 99.80 ± 22.34 µg/kg (Table 2, p. 4).
- Oat products (n = 45): arsenic 10.19 ± 8.12 µg/kg, cadmium 31.97 ± 24.92 µg/kg (Table 4, p. 5).
- Quinoa grains (n = 30): cadmium 27.53 ± 8.88 µg/kg, lead 53.97 ± 7.42 µg/kg (Table 5, p. 6).
Methods (brief)
Closed microwave nitric acid digestion; ICP-MS (NexION 300D) with LODs of 0.019 (arsenic), 0.017 (cadmium) and 0.16 µg/kg (lead); mercury by AMA-254. CRM INCT-CF-3 corn flour every ten samples, recoveries 99.2 to 101.5%. One package per producer, no replicates.
Evidence Fitness
Large, well-controlled retail survey with full summary statistics. Several table cells appear copied between rows (expanded millet groats repeat expanded buckwheat, oat groats repeat maize groats, tricolor quinoa cadmium repeats its arsenic cells), some totals conflict with their subgroups, and the abstract misattributes the 74.52 µg/kg lead mean to millet; these are flagged in the extraction. The products are a cereal proxy for the cereal, infant-oat-cereal and wheat-cereal-biscuits pages, which are not linked.