Overview
This single-author study measured arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel and lead by ICP-MS in 29 dried fruit samples bought at an open bazaar in Antalya, Turkey, and calculated hazard quotients. The only numbers printed for foods are overall ranges across all samples; per-fruit means appear only in a bar chart. Dried dates had no detectable elements and dried figs had only cadmium.
Key numbers
- Arsenic < LOD to 5.22, cadmium < LOD to 14.46, chromium < LOD to 8.39, nickel < LOD to 13.59 and lead < LOD to 8.42 µg/kg across all samples (Results text, p. 401).
- “no elements were detected in dried dates”; only cadmium was detected in dried figs (p. 401).
- Hazard quotients were below 1 for all samples (p. 401).
Methods (brief)
Fruits were washed, chopped, oven-dried 4 h at 70 °C and ground; about 0.5 g was digested in closed vessels with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide and analyzed by ICP-MS with standard addition calibration. Detection limits were 0.13 to 0.25 µg/L in the digest. Certified tomato leaves and strawberry leaves recovered 98.8 to 100.6%.
Evidence Fitness
Good analytical QA, but the food results are thin: only overall maxima are printed, per-fruit values are figure-only, and the number of samples per fruit is not given. The µg/kg magnitudes are low compared with the µg/g literature the paper cites; the unit is kept as printed. Dried grapes (Izmir grape, black grape) were analyzed, but no raisin-specific number is printed. For bran-cereal-with-raisins this is a proxy at most (raisin ingredient, no cereal measured).