Risk Assessment and Determination of Heavy Metals in Home Meal Replacement Products by Using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Direct Mercury Analyzer

Overview

Hwang and colleagues measured lead, cadmium, total arsenic, tin, total mercury, and methylmercury in 480 home meal replacement (HMR) products purchased in Korea. The product panel included ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat, ready-to-cook, and ready-to-prepare foods. Some HMR subgroups included infant and toddler foods, but the paper reports occurrence by fat/liquid matrix phase rather than by infant-formula row, so this page routes only to the broad prepared-meals product row.

The source does not provide brand-level values. The occurrence table is reported at matrix-phase level and is therefore compatible with the brand firewall.

Key numbers

Sample frame:

Table 5 reports heavy-metal concentrations in HMR matrix phases. Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and tin are in mg/kg; total mercury and methylmercury are in ug/kg. ND means not detected at the method detection limit.

The paper also reports:

Method-validation summary from Tables 1-4:

Table 4 CRM accuracy checks:

Exposure-assessment values from Table 6 are reported as chronic daily intake (ug/kg/day) for total heavy metals by matrix phase and age group:

Additional exposure/risk values reported in the text:

Methods (brief)

The authors purchased HMR products from Korean convenience and grocery stores from January to September 2020. After removing non-edible portions, samples were homogenized and stored at -18 C.

For Pb, Cd, As, and Sn, 0.5 g samples were digested with 7 mL ultrapure nitric acid and 0.5 mL hydrogen peroxide in a microwave-assisted acid digestion system, diluted to 25 mL, filtered through 0.45 um membranes, and analyzed by ICP-MS. For Me-Hg, 1.0 g samples were extracted with sodium chloride, hydrochloric acid, toluene, and L-cysteine before DMA analysis. Total Hg was also analyzed by DMA.

Implications

This is direct occurrence evidence for Korean home meal replacement and prepared-meal products. The study is useful for prepared-food heavy-metal surveillance and for method context where matrices span solid/liquid and fatty/non-fatty foods.

For HMTc use, the paper’s product aggregation is broad. It does not provide product-row-specific values for infant formula powder, baby foods, seafood, sauces, breads, rice cakes, meat products, or meal kits. The values should remain broad prepared-meal context unless a later extraction pass can resolve product-row fit from supplementary material or underlying sample metadata. Total arsenic is not inorganic arsenic, and total mercury is not methylmercury except for the explicit Me-Hg rows.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Mixed Meals / Prepared Foods
• Lead
• Cadmium
• Arsenic, Total
• Tin, Inorganic
• Mercury
• Methylmercury

Verification notes

• Identity check: DOI 10.3390/foods11040504, raw handle RPMEHG_10-3390-foods11040504, candidate cite-key hwang2022-home-meal-replacement-heavy-metals, and SHA-256 b350623fc3c797088ca2208c4ce84f2b83320b09a2e6ceb57000abc0f129facd were searched before creation; no existing clean post-2026-05-14 source page was found.
• Full-PDF read performed from the 13-page MDPI PDF. Tables 1-6 were checked once from pdftotext -layout and Table 5 was checked a second time against a rendered page image before commit. The source’s supplementary Tables S1-S5 are named by the PDF but were not bundled in the local PDF.
• Brand firewall: the page reports only source-level matrix-phase results and no brand-by-brand values.
• HMTc firewall: page records source facts only; no certification threshold, percentile, or pass/fail calculation is derived from this source.

Update history

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