Occurrence of cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic in prepared meals in Italy: Potential relevance for intake assessment

Overview

De Roma and colleagues measured cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic in prepared meal composites collected in Italy as practical surrogates for dietary-intake assessment. The 17 composites included baby food for toddlers, school canteen meals for children, adult canteen/fast-food/duplicate-portion meals, a vegetarian meal, and restaurant/hotel-school meals. The occurrence table is whole-composite prepared-meal evidence; it does not identify the contaminant concentration of individual menu ingredients. Arsenic and mercury are reported as total elements only, not inorganic arsenic or methylmercury.

Key numbers

Table 1 reports upper-bound contamination of mercury (Hg), lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), and As in meal composites, expressed as ng g−1:

Table 2 reports upper-bound daily dietary intake from the different composites, expressed as μg kg−1 b.w. day−1:

Additional source-reported observations:

• The abstract summarizes estimated intake ranges across surrogate diets as arsenic (As) 0.28-6.91, Cd 0.09-0.96, Pb 0.14-1.50, and Hg 0.03-0.40 μg kg−1 b.w. day−1.
• The authors state that cadmium intake from almost all surrogate diets was close to the EFSA TDI of 0.36 μg kg−1 b.w. day−1.
• The discussion attributes higher As values in BF, Ferrara, Portici, and RM-B to seafood-containing menus, including homogenised fish, halibut/fried fish, and “risotto alla pescatora”; these are menu-level explanations, not ingredient-specific concentration data.
• The paper states that arsenic speciation was not available and that this limits arsenic risk assessment.

Methods (brief)

Meals were collected in multiple Italian towns across northern, central, and southern Italy. The meals represented baby food for 9-12 month toddlers, school canteen lunches for 4-9 year children, adult canteen meals, fast-food meals, duplicate portions, a vegetarian meal, and restaurant meals from a secondary hotel-school. Samples were weighed, pooled, and homogenized into 17 composites. One gram of each pool was digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a microwave system and analyzed by ICP-MS-DRC. Concentrations were expressed on a wet-weight basis as mg kg−1 in the methods and as ng g−1 in Table 1. Upper-bound handling assigned the numerical value of the left-censoring limit to non-quantified results.

Implications

This source contributes Italy-market prepared-meal occurrence evidence for Cd, Pb, total Hg, and total As, especially for infant food composites and mixed meals as consumed outside the home. Because the samples are pooled whole meals, they are useful for prepared-meal and infant-food context but should not be used as direct concentration evidence for individual foods such as fish, rice, or cereal. Total Hg must not be substituted for methylmercury, and total As must not be substituted for inorganic arsenic.

Related evidence

• Baby Food
• Mixed Meals
• Baby Food
• Infant Food General
• Mixed Meals, Non-Rice
• Mixed Meals, Rice-Containing
• Cadmium
• Lead
• Mercury, Total
• Arsenic, Total

Update history

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