Overview
Islamoglu and colleagues pooled spinach, carrot, potato and apple bought at three Istanbul district markets in March 2017, and four fish bought in January 2018, and measured arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury by ICP-MS on fresh weight. Lead was about 0.41 to 0.44 ug/g in every fruit and vegetable, which the authors note is above the per-portion limits they apply. Arsenic and mercury in the produce were mostly printed as less-than values. The journal article has no DOI and its peer review could not be verified.
Key numbers
- Lead: carrot 0.432, potato 0.408, spinach 0.430, apple 0.436 ug/g fresh weight (Table 1, p. 73).
- Cadmium: carrot 0.055, potato 0.069, spinach 0.088, apple 0.053 ug/g (Table 1).
- Fish: anchovy arsenic 1.48 ug/g; farm trout lead 0.28 ug/g; canned tuna mercury 0.126 ug/g (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Produce washed, trimmed (potatoes and carrots peeled), pooled across the three markets and blended raw; fish filleted and pooled. 0.5 g wet sample microwave-digested in nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide; Agilent 7700 ICP-MS. One composite per food; no detection limits, reference materials or recoveries reported beyond the less-than values.
Evidence Fitness
One pooled composite per food without dispersion or QA data. The produce arsenic row is identical to values the paper’s own discussion attributes to an earlier study, so its provenance is flagged; the abstract also misstates which food had the most lead. Peer review is unverified (non-DOI journal). For parsnips this is a proxy: carrot and potato are root vegetables, but no parsnip was measured. For vegetables-mixed it is also a proxy (individual foods only).