Overview
The authors bought cricket flour, mealworm flour, buffalo worms and locusts at a market in Valencia and measured arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead by ICP-MS, along with mycotoxins. They then removed the fat by supercritical carbon dioxide extraction and found the metals stayed in the defatted cake, where cadmium rose in three of the four insects.
Key numbers
- Cadmium: cricket 134.33 ± 20, locust 172 ± 8, mealworm 219 ± 4.2, buffalo worm 46.05 ± 2.8 µg/kg (Table 3).
- Lead: cricket 100.33 ± 7, locust 36.70 ± 0.4, mealworm 24 ± 4, buffalo worm 45.50 ± 11 µg/kg; mercury < 5 µg/kg in all (Table 3).
- After extraction, cadmium in the mealworm cake was 281 µg/kg versus 219 µg/kg in the raw flour (Section 3.2).
Methods (brief)
Microwave digestion with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide, then ICP-MS (Agilent 7900) with external calibration. Detection limits are given only as instrument values in µg/L. No reference material or recovery is reported for metals.
Evidence Fitness
Direct data for edible insect products sold for people, but only one product per insect, no stated replicates or dates, unknown moisture basis and no metal reference material. The extraction result is useful: fat removal concentrates cadmium in the protein-rich cake rather than moving it into the oil.