Martin-Leon et al. 2023 - Canary Islands leafy-vegetable elements

Martin-Leon and colleagues measured essential, toxic, and potentially toxic elements in leafy vegetables sold for consumption in the Canary Islands. This is direct a1 occurrence evidence covering spinach and related leafy vegetables.

Key numbers

The study analyzed 244 ready-to-eat leafy-vegetable samples, including 30 spinach samples.

The abstract states that among toxic elements, Cd was the element with the highest concentration, followed by As and Pb, and that spinach was the leafy vegetable with the highest concentration of potentially toxic elements including Al, Cr, and Ni.

Table 1 reports spinach median concentrations for essential elements including Fe 38,743 ng/g, Zn 3748 ng/g, and Cu 698.1 ng/g, with interquartile ranges preserved in the source table.

The authors conclude that toxic-metal intakes from leafy-vegetable consumption in the Canary Islands did not show significant health-risk values for the modeled consumer groups, even though spinach, chard, arugula, and watercress were the highest-concentration vegetables in the dataset.

Methods (brief)

Samples were collected as ready-to-eat leafy vegetables, cleaned, homogenized, digested, and analyzed for 47 elements. Results were reported with medians and interquartile ranges, and the paper paired occurrence data with dietary-exposure scenarios for adult and child consumers.

Implications

Certification: Direct leafy-vegetable occurrence evidence that can support spinach and broad leafy-vegetable routing.

Courses: Useful for showing how a broad edible-leafy-vegetable basket can identify the highest-contributing commodities even when modeled risk remains low.

App: Eligible for spinach and leafy-vegetable occurrence context after synthesis.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Spinach
• Leafy / Green Vegetables, Other
• Non-Root Vegetables
• Cadmium
• Arsenic, Total
• Lead
• Aluminum
• Nickel

Verification notes

Recovered from the corpus-rescreen queue under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule. The queue title surfaced this through a spinach gap, but the source is broader than spinach and should remain visible at both the spinach and leafy-vegetable layers.

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.