Overview
The authors bought 20 popular bread brands in Makurdi, Benue State, both directly from bakeries and from distribution outlets, plus three flours used by local bakers, and measured iron, lead, chromium, zinc, nickel and cadmium by flame atomic absorption spectrometry. Tables 1 to 3 give a triplicate mean per brand or flour. Lead was generally higher in bread from outlets than in the same brands from bakeries.
Key numbers
- Bread from outlets: lead 0.010 to 0.66 mg/kg; cadmium detected in one brand only, 0.025 ± 0.005 mg/kg (Table 1).
- Bread from bakeries: lead not detected to 0.355 ± 0.050 mg/kg; cadmium not detected in any brand (Table 2).
- Flours: lead 0.0140 to 0.0170 mg/kg; cadmium not detected (Table 3).
Methods (brief)
Bread slices were air-dried, oven-dried at 60 °C, powdered and sieved; 1.0 g was digested in hydrochloric and perchloric acid and read by flame AAS following AOAC methods, in triplicate. Calibration used three standards and blanks. No reference material, recovery or detection limit is reported, and results are on the dried sample although the tables do not say so.
Evidence Fitness
A sizable local bread survey, but analytical quality is uncertain: no detection limit or reference material, and iron and zinc values are far below what bread normally contains. The text and Table 2 disagree on the lowest bakery chromium value, and the flour table nearly matches the flour table of the same group’s Jalingo paper (tutuwa2023-jalingo-bread-baking-fuel-metals), so the flour data should not be counted as independent. The authors are printed surname-first as “Ikwebe Joseph & Bando Christopher David” (the group cites itself as “Bando, C. D., Ikwebe, J.”); the record id keeps the manifest surname Joseph. Bread and flour are a proxy for white cake, so the white-cake page is not linked.