Toxic Elements in Commercial Infant Food, Estimated Dietary Intake, and Risk Assessment in Poland

Monika Mania; Maria Wojciechowska-Mazurek; Krystyna Starska; Malgorzata Rebeniak; Tomasz Szynal; Agnieszka Strzelecka; Jacek Postupolski

doi:10.15244/pjoes/59306

Mania et al. 2015 - toxic elements in Polish commercial infant foods

This monitoring study reports Pb, Cd, total As, and total Hg in approximately 1,000 infant-food samples collected across Poland from 2009 to 2013, with all products analyzed as sold. The dataset covers infant formulae, rice and non-rice cereal foods, biscuits, ready-to-eat meals, fish-based foods, fruit desserts, juices, and infant teas. The highest arsenic signals were in rice gruel and fish-based infant foods, the highest mercury signal was in fish-based infant foods, cadmium was most prominent in vegetable meals and some cereal products, and lead exposure estimates approached or exceeded EFSA reference-dose comparators in the authors’ infant diet scenarios.

Key numbers

Concentrations are mg/kg as sold. Tables 1-4 report lower-bound, middle-bound, and upper-bound statistics for left-censored data; this page uses middle-bound means as the compact category comparison. Sample counts differ by analyte because not every product was analyzed for every element.

Product category	n by analyte (Pb/Cd/tAs/tHg)	Pb MB mean	Cd MB mean	tAs MB mean	tHg MB mean
Infant and follow-on formula	112 / 119 / 118 / 113	0.0051	0.0012	0.0067	0.0007
Milk- and rice-based products	58 / 62 / 62 / 61	0.0046	0.0016	0.0121	0.0006
Soya-based infant formula	22 / 22 / 22 / 22	0.0060	0.0034	0.0110	0.0009
Rice gruel for infants	185 / 198 / 197 / 180	0.0083	0.0041	0.0595	0.0009
Wheat gruel for infants	74 / 86 / 86 / 76	0.0056	0.0047	0.0066	0.0006
Mixed cereals for infants	65 / 74 / 73 / 66	0.0064	0.0035	0.0102	0.0008
Biscuits for infants	49 / 49 / 49 / 48	0.0126	0.0066	0.0087	0.0007
Vegetable meals, ready-to-eat	49 / 49 / 49 / 49	0.0072	0.0096	0.0061	0.0006
Vegetable-meat meals, ready-to-eat	64 / 64 / 62 / 62	0.0077	0.0070	0.0058	0.0009
Fish-based infant foods, ready-to-eat	47 / 47 / 47 / 47	0.0073	0.0067	0.0666	0.0063
Fruit desserts for infants	43 / 43 / 43 / 41	0.0075	0.0018	0.0055	0.0005
Juices for infants	69 / 69 / 69 / 68	0.0061	0.0010	0.0058	0.0004
Herbal teas for infants	45 / 45 / 45 / 44	0.0064	0.0006	0.0071	0.0006
Herbal and fruit teas for infants	60 / 60 / 60 / 60	0.0071	0.0011	0.0045	0.0005

Source-reported high points and risk-assessment values:

Pb: infant formula and follow-on formula mean MB 0.0051 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0099 mg/kg; biscuits mean MB 0.0126 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0282 mg/kg; rice gruel mean MB 0.0083 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0146 mg/kg. The discussion reports a highest pure-rice-gruel Pb value of 0.120 mg/kg.
Cd: vegetable meals mean MB 0.0096 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0174 mg/kg; biscuits mean MB 0.0066 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0109 mg/kg; wheat gruel mean MB 0.0047 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0090 mg/kg; rice gruel mean MB 0.0041 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0119 mg/kg. The discussion reports a pure-rice-gruel Cd value of 0.0490 mg/kg, above the source-cited 0.040 mg/kg EU maximum level for cereal-based infant foods at the time.
tAs: rice gruel mean MB 0.0595 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.1404 mg/kg; fish-based infant foods mean MB 0.0666 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.1781 mg/kg. The discussion reports the highest tAs values as 0.297 mg/kg in rice gruel and 0.195 mg/kg in a cod-fish-and-vegetables dinner.
tHg: fish-based infant foods mean MB 0.0063 mg/kg, P90 MB 0.0127 mg/kg; other categories were at or below 0.0009 mg/kg mean MB. The discussion reports the highest mercury value as 0.0185 mg/kg in a vegetable-and-fish infant dinner.
Dietary exposure estimates from the abstract and Results: mean Pb exposure 0.09 to 0.53 microgram/kg bw/day for 3- and 12-month infants; mean Cd exposure 0.02 to 0.39-0.4 microgram/kg bw/day; mean tAs exposure 0.11 to 0.99 microgram/kg bw/day; mean organic-Hg worst-case exposure 0.01 to 0.08 microgram/kg bw/day.

Methods (brief)

The National Institute of Public Health - National Institute of Hygiene coordinated a 2009-2013 monitoring programme in which Polish sanitary-epidemiological stations sampled infant foods from retail markets in all provinces. Sampling followed Commission Regulation No. 333/2007 for official control of Pb, Cd, Hg, inorganic tin, 3-MCPD, and benzo(a)pyrene in foodstuffs. All products were analyzed as sold, without reconstitution.

Lead and cadmium were determined by atomic absorption spectrometry after either microwave digestion according to EN 14083:2003 or dry ashing based on EN 14082:2003, using FAAS after APDC extraction or GFAAS. Arsenic was determined by hydride-generation AAS after dry ashing according to EN 14546:2005. Mercury was determined by cold-vapour AAS either directly or after pressure digestion according to EN 13806:2002. The paper reports total arsenic and total mercury only; it does not speciate inorganic arsenic, methylmercury, or inorganic mercury in the samples.

Participating laboratories were accredited to EN ISO/IEC 17025:2005. Quality assurance included certified reference materials, internal and external quality procedures, and interlaboratory proficiency tests including NIPH-NIH, FAPAS, and EU-RL-HM/JRC-IRMM programmes. The paper does not provide individual LOD or LOQ values; it reports left-censored statistics using the EFSA lower-bound, middle-bound, and upper-bound substitution approach.

Implications

Standards work: This source contributes a broad Polish-market occurrence dataset for infant formulae, infant cereals, baby snacks, ready-to-eat infant meals, fish-containing baby foods, fruit products, juices, and infant teas. For the gap-targeted non-rice dry baby cereal cell, the directly relevant groups are wheat gruel and mixed cereals; rice gruel is separately relevant to the rice-based dry baby cereal cell.

Courses: Useful for teaching why infant-food monitoring needs both product-form stratification and metal speciation discipline. The same source reports low total mercury in most cereal and formula categories but a distinct fish-food mercury signal, and it reports total arsenic without inorganic-arsenic speciation.

App: Supports Polish-market occurrence context for infant cereals and several ready-to-eat baby-food categories, with as-sold concentrations rather than prepared-as-fed concentrations.

Microbiome: Not addressed in this study.

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Verification notes

Ingested 2026-05-18 from the gap-driven auto-fetch queue. The same PDF was downloaded four times for baby-cereals-dry-non-rice Cd, iAs, tAs, and tHg wishlist cells; all four files have identical SHA-256 7d521247d2ced1b880a35d0648b4362666a3e8d0b813ce99bb5aac6fb90a74f8. This page uses the Cd-targeted ingested path as raw_path and treats the other three paths as duplicate fetches for the same DOI.
DOI identity check found no existing wiki source page for 10.15244/pjoes/59306; matches were only reference-list citations in other source markdown and wishlist-audit rows.
Speciation: frontmatter uses tAs and tHg because the paper measures total arsenic and total mercury. The exposure section discusses methylmercury and inorganic mercury as risk-assessment assumptions, not measured species.
Product routing follows the source’s product groups. Rice gruel and milk/rice-based products route to rice-based baby cereal context; wheat gruel and mixed cereals route to non-rice baby cereal context; biscuits route to teething/snack context; ready-to-eat vegetable, vegetable-meat, fish, fruit, and juice categories route to the closest infant-food product pages.

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
ce3e07c	2026-05-28	activation \| Vercel DATACITE env slots set, curators.md filled with founder entry + six scoped reviewer invitations, peer-review onboarding playbook drafted
51400b9	2026-05-28	audit-queue: gasparik2017-wild-boar-slovakia-metals audited-revised

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