Overview
Damastuti and colleagues sampled 24 street vended foods bought near four elementary schools in Bandung, Indonesia, and measured chromium, iron, zinc and mercury by neutron activation analysis and copper and manganese by flame AAS. They converted results to a wet-weight basis and estimated hazard quotients for 30 kg children. Lead, cadmium and arsenic were not measured.
Key numbers
- Chromium across all foods “0.01 - 5.86 mg/kg (wet weight basis)”; 12.5% of foods were above a 1 mg/kg comparison limit (section 3.2, p. 7).
- Mercury across all foods “n.d (not detectable) - 0.04 mg/kg”; the ‘cubit’ cake was closest to the 0.05 mg/kg national limit (section 3.2, p. 8).
- Zinc 0.31 to 22.4 mg/kg; copper 0.004 to 1.93 mg/kg (section 3.2).
- Hazard index 0.06 to 2.32 (mean 0.64), driven mainly by chromium (Table 4).
Methods (brief)
Each food was blended, freeze-dried and powdered. Chromium, iron, zinc and mercury were measured by instrumental NAA against a mixed standard, and copper and manganese by flame AAS after microwave digestion. SRM NIST 1548a and 1567a gave 94 to 103% recovery, but neither certifies chromium or mercury.
Evidence Fitness
A small single-visit sample with one sample per food type and per-food results shown only as bar charts, so the extraction holds only the across-food ranges printed in the text. Chromium and mercury accuracy is unverified. The fried wheat-batter snacks here are a proxy for the doughnut page, not doughnut measurements, and no lead or cadmium data exist.