Overview
Noori and colleagues bought commercial wheat flour in Khuzestan province across all seasons from 2016 to 2018. They measured lead and cadmium by graphite furnace AAS and estimated intake and cancer risk for Iranian adults, children and an Arab export population. Table 2 gives means by season and year with seasonal ranges.
Key numbers
- Overall lead 0.0633 ± 0.35 mg/kg and cadmium 0.015 ± 0.011 mg/kg (Table 2, Average row, p. 718).
- Summer lead (n = 111): mean 0.066 ± 0.052 mg/kg, range 0.06 to 0.500 mg/kg (Table 2).
- Cadmium seasonal means 0.012 to 0.019 mg/kg; maximum 0.110 mg/kg in summer (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Flour was oven-dried at 100 °C, digested with nitric and perchloric acids by microwave and read by GFAAS. A rice flour reference material gave 89% (lead) and 101% (cadmium) recovery. Detection limits were estimated but not printed.
Evidence Fitness
A multi-year market series, but Table 2 has several printing errors: a summer 2018 lead mean of 0.50 mg/kg that is ten times its neighbors, a winter lead range of “0.06-160”, and SDs much larger than their means. The abstract and methods also disagree on sample and brand counts. Peer review is unverified. The DOI printed in the PDF was used but not checked against Crossref. Wheat flour is an ingredient proxy for flour-tortilla, butter-crackers, graham-crackers and cinnamon-roll; those pages are not linked.