Maspalma et al. 2021 — heavy metals in Nigerian wild fruits

Maspalma and coauthors measured Fe, Cd, Pb, Cr, Mn, Ni, Co, and Zn in mature ripe Ximenia americana and Sclerocarya birrea wild fruits from Adamawa State, Nigeria. The paper is routeable as fresh-fruit occurrence evidence, but the values are dry-weight fruit measurements from two wild species rather than a market basket of packaged fruit products.

Key numbers

• The authors collected mature and ripe Ximenia americana and Sclerocarya birrea fruits from farmlands in Pella and Pella Gwaja, with three trees selected for each fruit species.
• All concentrations are reported as mg/g on a dry-weight basis.
• Sclerocarya birrea: Fe 8.83 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Cd 0.01 +/- 0.00 mg/g, Pb 0.04 +/- 0.02 mg/g, Cr 0.19 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Mn 4.27 +/- 0.20 mg/g, Ni 0.21 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Co 0.09 +/- 0.01 mg/g, and Zn 2.96 +/- 0.02 mg/g.
• Ximenia americana: Fe 6.37 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Cd 0.02 +/- 0.01 mg/g, Pb 0.01 +/- 0.00 mg/g, Cr 0.24 +/- 0.01 mg/g, Mn 2.50 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Ni 0.29 +/- 0.10 mg/g, Co 0.17 +/- 0.00 mg/g, and Zn 2.31 +/- 0.06 mg/g.
• The authors compare the reported Pb, Cd, Cr, and Ni values with cited maximum allowable concentrations and state that the measured values did not exceed those comparators.

Methods (brief)

The fruits were washed with distilled water, dried at room temperature, powdered, and digested with a tri-acid mixture of nitric, perchloric, and sulfuric acids. Metal concentrations were measured by Buck Scientific 210VGP atomic absorption spectrometry, with calibration curves prepared for the eight reported elements. The paper says each sample result represents an average of three replicate readings.

Implications

Certification: The paper contributes occurrence evidence for wild fresh-fruit matrices in Nigeria, but the dry-weight basis and two-species sample frame make it unsuitable as a direct benchmark for US-market fresh fruit without conversion and market stratification.

Courses: This is a compact example of why edible wild fruits can contain measurable Pb, Cd, Cr, and Ni even when authors judge them below cited food-safety comparators.

App: The source can support a low-specificity fresh-fruit context flag for Ximenia americana and Sclerocarya birrea; it should not be generalized to all fresh fruit as a market distribution.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• fresh-fruit
• fruit
• lead
• cadmium
• chromium
• nickel

Verification notes

• The auto-fetched filename targeted supplement enzymes, but the PDF itself is a food-occurrence paper on wild fruits. Routing follows the actual PDF content, not the filename.
• The extracted table text contains OCR artifacts for some Sclerocarya birrea entries, including dropped decimals. The values above follow the abstract and the narrative result paragraphs, which agree on Fe 8.83 mg/g and Cr 0.19 mg/g rather than the malformed table text.
• The source reports total chromium as Cr and does not identify Cr(VI); it must not be routed as hexavalent chromium evidence.

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.