Islam et al. 2015 — Heavy metals in commonly consumed foods from Bangladesh

Islam and colleagues measured chromium, nickel, copper, arsenic, cadmium, and lead in commonly consumed foods from Bogra district, Bangladesh. The sampled food groups were meat, egg, fish, milk, vegetables, cereals, and fruits, with concentrations reported in mg/kg fw. Arsenic is reported as total arsenic in the occurrence table; the later cancer-risk calculation assumes 50% inorganic arsenic, but the concentration data are not speciated.

Key numbers

The abstract reports all-food concentration ranges in mg/kg fw: Cr 0.058-10, Ni 0.036-25, Cu 0.045-40, As 0.005-7.1, Cd 0.001-5.5, and Pb 0.005-13.

Table 1 reports heavy metals in commonly consumed foods as Mean +/- SD in mg/kg fw:

Additional source-reported findings:

• The text reports the highest mean Cr in wheat at 3.5 mg/kg, followed by pangas fish at 2.7 mg/kg and chicken meat at 2.4 mg/kg.
• The highest mean Ni was reported in guava fruit at 9.0 mg/kg, followed by tilapia fish at 4.9 mg/kg and wheat at 3.7 mg/kg.
• The highest mean Cu was reported in guava fruit at 18 mg/kg and the lowest in beef at 1.8 mg/kg.
• The highest mean total As was reported in mango and guava fruit at 1.3 mg/kg, followed by pangas fish and maize at 1.0 mg/kg.
• The highest Cd concentration was reported in tilapia fish, mean 0.84 and range 0.004-5.5 mg/kg.
• The highest Pb in cereals was reported in wheat, mean 4.8 and range 0.06-11 mg/kg, followed by maize, mean 2.4 and range 0.09-9.1 mg/kg, and rice, mean 1.9 and range 0.20-7.3 mg/kg.
• Table 2 total daily intake via food for adults was Cr 1.33, Ni 1.81, Cu 7.53, As 0.333, Cd 0.155, and Pb 1.63 mg/day.
• Table 2 total daily intake via food for children was Cr 0.637, Ni 0.896, Cu 3.70, As 0.167, Cd 0.079, and Pb 0.765 mg/day.

Methods (brief)

The study collected commonly consumed foods during February-March and August-September 2012 from Bogra district, Bangladesh, including agriculture-field, dairy-farm, poultry-farm, Korotoa River, and market sources. Edible portions were washed with distilled water, cut, oven-dried at 70-80 °C to constant weight, pulverized, sieved through a 2 mm nylon sieve, and stored at -20 °C before analysis. About 0.5 g of food sample was digested with 6 ml 69% HNO3 and 2 ml 30% H2O2 in a closed Teflon vessel using a Berghof speedwave microwave digestion system, filtered, diluted to 25 ml, and analyzed by ICP-MS. Certified reference materials INCT-CF-3 corn flour and DORM-2 dogfish muscle were used for analytical accuracy; detection limits were 0.7, 0.6, 0.8, 0.4, 0.06, and 0.09 ng/L for Cr, Ni, Cu, As, Cd, and Pb, respectively.

Implications

This source contributes Bangladesh-market occurrence evidence for total Cr, Ni, Cu, total As, Cd, and Pb across multiple food categories, including freshwater fish, rice, other cereals, vegetables, fresh fruit, meat, eggs, and milk. It is especially relevant for row-fit decisions where broad mixed-food evidence needs to be separated into product families rather than treated as a single pooled food category. Arsenic results are total As occurrence data; they should not be used as inorganic-arsenic concentrations without a separately logged conversion or assumption.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• meat-and-poultry
• eggs
• fish
• milk-and-dairy
• vegetables
• root-vegetables
• non-root-vegetables
• rice
• maize
• wheat
• fruits
• beef-product
• lamb-mutton
• poultry-product
• eggs-product
• fish-freshwater
• milk-and-dairy
• non-root-vegetables
• root-tuber-vegetables
• rice-bulk-grain
• other-grain-products
• fresh-fruit
• chromium
• nickel
• copper
• arsenic-total
• cadmium
• lead

Verification notes

• PDF text extracted with pdftotext -layout; because Table 1 rendered +/- as 7 and range dashes as extraction artifacts, page 466 was also rendered from the PDF and checked visually before drafting the concentration table.
• DOI verified from the first page as 10.1016/j.ecoenv.2015.09.022; DOI, raw-handle, and cite-key checks found no existing source page before creation.
• Table 1 values above were checked against the rendered PDF table on page 466. Units are copied as mg/kg fw; no conversion was made.
• Speciation: the occurrence table reports total As only. The paper’s target carcinogenic risk table includes a footnote assuming 50% inorganic As in foods, but that is a risk-calculation assumption and not a speciated concentration measurement.
• Chromium is reported as total Cr only; the source does not report Cr(VI). Mercury is not measured.
• The exact total sample count was not reported cleanly in the extracted text, so sample_n is left null rather than inferred from the food-item table.
• 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.