Overview
The authors bought 18 fish-based baby food purees of eight brands in Italy in 2019, checked the fish species by DNA barcoding and measured 13 elements by ICP-MS on a wet-weight basis. Three products were mislabeled (Alaska pollock or Southern hake sold as hake, rainbow trout sold as salmon). Lead, cobalt, antimony and vanadium were below detection in every product; total arsenic was the main toxic element found.
Key numbers
- Total arsenic: mean 0.487 ± 0.511 mg/kg w.w., median 0.397, range 0.039-1.856 (Table 2).
- Total mercury: mean 0.010 ± 0.002 mg/kg, maximum 0.015; 66.6 percent of results below the 0.009 mg/kg LOD (Table 2, Section 2.2).
- Cadmium: mean 0.003 mg/kg, maximum 0.007; 61.1 percent below LOD (Table 2).
- Lead: all results below the LOD of 0.003 mg/kg (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
About 0.5 g of wet puree was digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a microwave system and analyzed by ICP-MS with yttrium and rhenium internal standards. LODs ranged from 0.002 to 0.015 mg/kg. Quality control was a spiked duplicate per batch (recoveries 92-115 percent); no certified reference material is reported. Values below LOD were set to half the LOD for statistics.
Evidence Fitness
A direct measurement of commercial fish-containing baby foods, but only pooled statistics across all 18 products are printed, so species or brand differences cannot be read. The mercury median equals the LOD even though two thirds of results were below it, which does not fit the stated half-LOD substitution. Arsenic is total arsenic only, and the inorganic and methylmercury fractions in the risk section are assumed, not measured.