Jayanthi et al. 2019 - Heavy metals in Chennai ready-to-eat chicken
Jayanthi and colleagues measured aluminium, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, mercury, and lead in ready-to-eat chicken street foods from Chennai. This is direct product-occurrence evidence for processed poultry products, with region-by-product means reported in ppm.
Key numbers
Table 1 reports mean ± SE concentrations in ppm. Selected high values highlighted by the authors include aluminium 10.30 ± 2.99 ppm in central-region tandoori chicken, arsenic 0.38 ± 0.18 ppm in central-region grilled chicken, cadmium 2.21 ± 0.65 ppm in southern-region chicken 65, chromium 2.82 ± 1.58 ppm in southern-region chicken 65, mercury 0.12 ± 0.10 ppm in northern-region grilled chicken, and lead 4.00 ± 2.07 ppm in southern-region grilled chicken.
Table 1 reports the following full product-by-region means, ppm:
| Element | Product | North | Central | South |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cd | Chicken 65 | 0.99 ± 0.09 | 0.78 ± 0.12 | 2.21 ± 0.65 |
| Cd | Chilly chicken | 1.04 ± 0.10 | 0.75 ± 0.14 | 1.96 ± 0.54 |
| Cd | Grilled chicken | 0.97 ± 0.11 | 0.80 ± 0.12 | 1.95 ± 0.52 |
| Cd | Tandoori chicken | 0.89 ± 0.10 | 0.76 ± 0.14 | 1.81 ± 0.65 |
| Pb | Chicken 65 | 0.28 ± 0.28 | 0.60 ± 0.44 | 2.04 ± 1.56 |
| Pb | Chilly chicken | 0.69 ± 0.33 | 1.29 ± 0.65 | 3.30 ± 1.68 |
| Pb | Grilled chicken | 0.65 ± 0.37 | 0.96 ± 0.59 | 4.00 ± 2.07 |
| Pb | Tandoori chicken | 0.35 ± 0.25 | 1.41 ± 0.71 | 3.69 ± 1.55 |
Methods (brief)
The study analyzed 288 samples collected from street food outlets in three Chennai regions. Samples represented four ready-to-eat chicken products and were measured by ICP-OES after wet digestion. The authors converted source readings from ppb (ug/kg) to ppm (mg/kg) for presentation and analyzed regional differences with one-way ANOVA in SPSS 14.0.
Implications
Certification: This is direct processed-poultry occurrence evidence, but it is a street-food sample frame rather than packaged retail products.
Courses: Useful example of how cooking environment, utensils, spices, and packaging can all be discussed by authors as possible contributors to finished-product contamination.
App: Context for processed chicken and poultry-product exposure narratives.
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Verification notes
Recovered from skip:incomplete-metadata during the 2026-06-11 recovery fire. DOI was not visible in the extracted text, but the paper contains direct occurrence values for ready-to-eat chicken products and is in-scope lane a1 evidence.
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.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 7faea44 | 2026-06-11 | recovery ingest 2026-06-11: corpus rescreen batch of 10 sources |