Huang et al. 2014 — As, Cd, Hg, and Pb in vegetables from Zhejiang

Huang and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead in 343 vegetable samples from Zhejiang province, China. The source reports mean and P97.5 concentrations in mg/kg fresh weight, plus counts above Chinese maximum allowable concentrations. Arsenic and mercury are reported as total As and total Hg only; no inorganic arsenic or methylmercury speciation is provided.

Key numbers

Table 2 reports concentrations of heavy metals in vegetables from Zhejiang province in mg/kg:

Additional source-reported numbers:

• The abstract states mean levels of As, Cd, Hg, and Pb were 0.009, 0.015, 0.003, and 0.022 mg/kg, respectively.
• The results section specifies the basis as mg/kg fresh weight.
• The study reports that 4.37% of samples exceeded the Cd MAC, 2.62% exceeded the Hg MAC, and 3.79% exceeded the Pb MAC; all samples were within the As MAC.
• The highest mean As and Cd levels by vegetable type were both in rape, at 0.022 and 0.046 mg/kg.
• The highest mean Hg level was in parsley at 0.029 mg/kg.
• The highest mean Pb level was in spinach at 0.056 mg/kg.
• The exposure table reports estimated vegetable intake of 273.3 g/day/person.
• Table 3 reports daily intake assessment values in mg/kg bw/day: As mean 0.04 and P97.5 0.71; Cd mean 0.07 and P97.5 1.48; Hg mean 0.01 and P97.5 0.142; Pb mean 0.11 and P97.5 1.27.
• Table 3 reports health hazard index values: As mean 0.01 and P97.5 0.24; Cd mean 0.09 and P97.5 1.85; Hg mean 0.10 and P97.5 1.01; Pb mean 0.07 and P97.5 0.84.
• The analytical LODs of As, Cd, Hg, and Pb were 0.005, 0.001, 0.005, and 0.005 mg/kg, respectively.

Methods (brief)

The study collected celery (52), asparagus (28), bamboo shoots (30), cabbage (25), Chinese cabbage (30), pakchoi (22), spinach (43), rape (37), tomato (21), eggplant (24), and cucumber (31) samples from Zhejiang, China, between March and October 2012. Samples were stored at 4 °C and analyzed within 24 h after nitric-acid/hydrogen-peroxide digestion. Cd and Pb were measured by graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry on a Thermo SOLAAR iCE3000; As and Hg were measured by hydride generation-atomic fluorescence spectrometry. Below-LOD values were assigned one-half LOD for mean calculations where the proportion below LOD was not greater than 60%.

Implications

This source contributes China-market occurrence evidence for total As, Cd, total Hg, and Pb in fresh vegetables, including leafy, non-root, and root/tuber vegetable categories. The concentrations are fresh-weight values and should not be mixed with dry-weight produce studies without an explicit basis conversion. Because arsenic and mercury are reported only as total elements, this page is not suitable for inorganic-arsenic or methylmercury-specific pooling.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• vegetables
• leafy-vegetables
• root-vegetables
• non-root-vegetables
• leafy-vegetables-other
• non-root-vegetables
• root-tuber-vegetables
• arsenic-total
• cadmium
• mercury-total
• lead

Verification notes

• PDF text extracted with pdftotext -layout; the extracted text contained the title, author list, DOI, methods, Tables 1-3, discussion, conclusion, and references.
• DOI verified from the first page as 10.1016/j.foodcont.2013.08.036; DOI, raw-handle, and cite-key checks found no existing source page before creation.
• Table 2 values were checked against the extracted text. The range separator renders in pdftotext as e in <LODe0.160, <LODe0.397, <LODe0.032, and <LODe0.270; this page records those ranges as less-than-LOD to the stated upper value without changing the numeric endpoints.
• Units are copied as mg/kg, mg/kg fresh weight, and mg/kg bw/day; no conversion was made.
• Speciation: As and Hg are total-element results only. The source does not report inorganic arsenic, methylmercury, inorganic mercury, or chromium.
• Frontmatter product and ingredient slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; no new slug was invented.

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.