Overview
Pan and Han report five years of provincial monitoring of cadmium in fresh vegetables in Zhejiang, southeast China, covering 52 species grouped into 10 vegetable types. Table 1 gives the mean, 97.5th percentile and range per type on a wet-weight basis, and the text lists the ten species with the highest means. Dietary exposure for adults and children is also estimated.
Key numbers
- All vegetables: cadmium 0.035 ± 0.021 mg/kg ww, P97.5 0.074, range <LOD to 1.82; 3.89% (96/2465) above the Chinese limit (Table 1, p. 4).
- Bulb vegetables: 0.189 ± 0.105 mg/kg (n=175), P97.5 1.20 (Table 1, p. 4).
- Leaf vegetables: 0.030 ± 0.017 mg/kg (n=409); spinach species mean 0.047 mg/kg ww (Table 1; Section 3.1).
- Mean EDI 0.519 µg/kg bw/day for adults and 0.217 for children (Abstract).
Methods (brief)
Edible parts were homogenized and analysed within a day by GB 5009.268-2016: microwave digestion with nitric acid at 190 °C and ICP-MS. The cadmium LOD was 0.002 mg/kg, and CRMs GBW10014 (cabbage) and GBW10015 (spinach) were within 10% of certified values. Values below LOD were set to half the LOD in means.
Evidence Fitness
A large, QA-supported monitoring dataset and a direct measurement for non-root-vegetables. Per-city, per-year and most per-species values are figure-only, and the bulb vegetable mean exceeds its highest printed species mean. For vegetable-beef-soup it is only a proxy for the vegetable ingredients, and that page is not linked.