Overview
Marzabadi and colleagues measured arsenic, chromium, cadmium, lead and mercury by neutron activation analysis and ICP-AES in 7 rice and 12 dry pasta products bought in Arak, Iran, in September and October 2024, then modelled cancer risk with Monte Carlo simulation and machine learning. Table 2 gives a mean ± SD of triplicate analyses for each product on a dry-weight basis.
Key numbers
- Pasta MF-8: arsenic 0.8341 ± 0.018 mg/kg and lead 0.1223 ± 0.005 mg/kg; MF-7: arsenic 0.4707 ± 0.010 mg/kg and lead 0.1366 ± 0.006 mg/kg (Table 2).
- Pasta MF-3: mercury 0.5020 ± 0.019 mg/kg, confirmed on reanalysis (Table 2; p. 20).
- Iranian rice cultivars: arsenic 0.11 to 0.14 mg/kg and lead 0.035 to 0.045 mg/kg (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Retail packages were frozen, subsampled, dried if needed and milled. INAA on about 100 mg; ICP-AES after closed-vessel microwave digestion; mercury by INAA only. NIST SRM 1568b rice flour with each batch, recoveries 85 to 115%. LODs (Table 2.1) are given for both methods.
Evidence Fitness
This is the accepted, unedited “Article in Press” manuscript, not the final typeset version. Only one package per product, a convenience sample, and the method behind each value is not identified. Many pasta cadmium, lead and mercury values and all rice mercury values are below the stated detection limits of both methods, so those low values are uncertain. Arsenic is total arsenic. Dry pasta is a proxy for canned-spaghetti and macaroni-and-cheese, and whole-wheat status is not stated, so it is only a proxy for whole-wheat-pasta; those pages are not linked.