de Lima et al. 2021 - Metals in canned tuna and sardines sold in Brazil

This Data in Brief article reports ICP-OES measurements of metals, one nonmetal, and one metalloid in canned tuna and canned sardines purchased from supermarkets in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The source tables use anonymized company codes; this wiki page aggregates by product form and range to avoid turning coded company rows into a brand- or company-comparison surface. Arsenic is reported as total arsenic (tAs) only; the study does not speciate inorganic arsenic.

Key numbers

Canned tuna, total arsenic (tAs, mg/kg, mean +/- SD of triplicate analytical readings):

• Natural grated tuna: 1.473-1.943 mg/kg across four coded product rows.
• Oil grated tuna: 1.379-1.783 mg/kg across four coded product rows.
• Solid natural tuna: 1.278-1.671 mg/kg across four coded product rows.
• Solid tuna in oil: 1.684-1.875 mg/kg across four coded product rows.
• All 16 canned-tuna rows exceeded the paper’s FAO/WHO fish-fillet comparator of 0.5 ug/g for As, with As pollution-index values 2.5-3.8.

Canned sardines, total arsenic (tAs, mg/kg, mean +/- SD of triplicate analytical readings):

• Sardines canned in oil: 3.053-4.493 mg/kg across five coded product rows.
• Sardines canned in tomato sauce: 2.467-3.839 mg/kg across five coded product rows.
• All 10 canned-sardine rows exceeded the paper’s 0.5 ug/g As comparator, with As pollution-index values 4.93-8.98.

Cadmium and lead:

• Cd was below the limit of detection in all canned-tuna and canned-sardine rows.
• Pb was below the limit of detection in all canned-tuna rows.
• Pb was detected in four canned-sardine rows at 0.005-0.011 mg/kg; the remaining sardine rows were below LOD.

Chromium and nickel:

• Cr was below LOD in all canned-tuna rows.
• Cr was detected in canned sardines at 0.007-0.110 mg/kg in nine of 10 rows; one sardine-in-tomato-sauce row was below LOD.
• Ni was below LOD in all canned-tuna and canned-sardine concentration tables. The paper’s HRI table nevertheless reports one canned-sardine Ni HRI value above 1 (4.08), creating a paper-internal inconsistency; the concentration table should not be read as showing measured Ni above LOD.

Aluminum, copper, and iron:

• Al in canned tuna was 10.254-18.281 mg/kg for natural grated tuna and 19.932-47.337 mg/kg for solid natural tuna; oil grated tuna was below LOD, and solid tuna in oil was below LOD except one 0.005 mg/kg row.
• Al in canned sardines was detected at 0.010-0.091 mg/kg.
• Cu pollution-index values were above 1 in most quantified rows: canned tuna 2.15-26.61 where detected, canned sardines 21.58-87.49.
• Fe pollution-index values were above 1 in every row: canned tuna 79.35-305.1, canned sardines 174.20-417.45.

Health Risk Index (HRI), as calculated by the paper:

• Canned tuna HRI values above 1 were reported for Al in natural grated and solid natural tuna rows (9.5-43.9), As in 15 rows (1.5-2.4; one row was exactly 1.0), Ba in two oil-grated rows (2.56 and 5.14), and Ca in solid natural and solid-in-oil rows (15.03-26.34).
• Canned sardine HRI values above 1 were reported for As (3.05-5.56 in all rows) and Cr (1.53-6.7 in nine rows). The reported Ni HRI value of 4.08 for one sardine-in-tomato-sauce row conflicts with the Table 2 Ni concentration results, which are all below LOD.

Methods (brief)

Canned tuna and sardines were purchased from popular supermarkets in Campo Grande, Brazil. Oil or sauce was drained, and the fish meat was ground in a stainless-steel blender. Approximately 400 mg of sample was digested with 1.0 mL HNO3 (65%), 3.0 mL high-purity water, and 1.0 mL H2O2 (35%) in a Speedwave four microwave digestion system (Berghof). Al, As, Ba, Ca, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ni, Pb, Se, and Zn were determined by ICP-OES (iCAP 6300 Duo, Thermo Fisher Scientific). Calibration curves covered 0.005-2.0 ppm and had R2 values of 0.991-0.999. Spike-and-recovery values were 95%-117%. Results are reported as mg/kg in drained fish meat. Raw data are also available from Mendeley Data at DOI 10.17632/zf95gwjjmk.1.

Implications for wiki use

This source contributes finished-product canned-fish occurrence data for Brazil. Its load-bearing contaminant finding is high total arsenic in both canned tuna and canned sardines, with sardines higher than tuna in this dataset. Because the method measured total arsenic only, the data must not be substituted for inorganic-arsenic occurrence.

For routing, this page supports canned fish, canned tuna as an ingredient, and broader seafood context. It does not support brand-level ranking, because the source uses anonymized company codes and the wiki aggregates them.

For risk-calculation context, the HRI and PI tables are source-side calculations. The Ni HRI row should be treated cautiously because it conflicts with the all-LOD Ni concentration table.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• arsenic-total
• aluminum
• barium
• cadmium
• cobalt
• chromium
• copper
• iron
• lead
• nickel
• zinc
• canned-tuna
• tinned-fish
• fish
• seafood
• canned-fish
• seafood

Verification notes

• Manual-fetch merge-enhance (Codex, 2026-05-18): matched DOI and raw path to P0175, corrected raw_handle and PDF SHA-256 provenance, replaced invalid ingredients/sardines with existing broader tinned-fish/fish/seafood routing, replaced brand-code value listings with product-form ranges, and removed old HMTc/course/app language.
• Fresh-context audit (Codex subagent, 2026-05-18) returned REVISE for narrow HRI wording and matrix-vocabulary cleanup; revised the Al/As HRI sentence and changed matrices to broad fish.
• The source tables use coded company identifiers. This page intentionally reports ranges by product form rather than company-code rows to satisfy the strict Part 12 brand firewall.
• Paper-internal inconsistency: Table 2 reports Ni below LOD in all canned-sardine concentration rows, but Table 6 reports one canned-sardine Ni HRI value of 4.08. This page preserves the Table 2 concentration result and flags the HRI inconsistency rather than treating Ni as a measured above-LOD sardine contaminant.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.