Overview
The authors bought 18 commercial baby foods (nine grain-based, nine vegetable-based) in Baghdad in June 2021 and measured lead and cadmium by flame AAS after dry ashing. Every product exceeded the 0.02 ppm lead limit the authors applied, with lead from 0.27 to 1.44 ppm, while cadmium was printed at about 0.001 ppm in all products. The byline spells the first author “Fadhe”; the manifest name Fadhel is used here.
Key numbers
- Grain-based baby foods: lead 0.2667 to 1.4363 ppm across nine products (Table 3, Fs1-Fs9).
- Vegetable-based baby foods: lead 0.3897 to 1.0986 ppm (Table 3, Fv10-Fv18).
- Cadmium in all 18 products: 0.0005 to 0.0015 ppm (Table 3).
Methods (brief)
Five grams of each product were ashed at 550 °C, digested in hydrochloric acid and read on a Shimadzu AA-7000 flame AAS against 0.2-1 µg/mL standards. No detection limit, reference material, recovery or blank is reported. Basis (as sold, wet or dry) is not stated.
Evidence Fitness
Small market sample with weak quality assurance. Table 4 column headings appear swapped relative to Table 3, the printed “mean” values equal the medians, and the concentration formula uses a 5 mL volume although digests were made to 50 mL. Cadmium values near 1 µg/kg are below what flame AAS normally detects. No fish-containing products were tested, and the vegetables are not named, so this is only a proxy for fish-containing-baby-foods, root-vegetable-purees and non-root-vegetable-purees, which are not linked. Whether the grain products are dry cereals or jars is not stated.