Overview
Pourimani and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead and copper by ICP-AES in thirteen packaged cereal products from Arak and modelled health risk with a machine learning framework. Table 4 gives one value per product; zeros mean below detection.
Key numbers
- Pasta and noodle lead: below detection in some products, otherwise 0.0010 to 0.1366 mg/kg (MF-7) (Table 4).
- Pasta and noodle arsenic: below detection in some products, otherwise 0.0012 to 0.8341 mg/kg (MF-8); mercury up to 0.5020 mg/kg (MF-3) (Table 4).
- Wheat germ powder lead: 0.2000 mg/kg (MF-13, Table 4).
Methods (brief)
Microwave digestion with nitric and hydrochloric acids and ICP-AES on three emission lines with triplicate readings. Spike recoveries 92.1 to 104.3 percent on three samples; no certified reference material.
Evidence Fitness
One sample per product. The PDF is the unedited accepted manuscript (Article in Press). The abstract ranges do not match Table 4, the text and table disagree on which samples had detectable mercury, and the stated ICP-AES detection limits are implausibly low. Whole-wheat status of the pastas is not stated, so this is pasta evidence, not whole-wheat-pasta; macaroni and cheese is not measured.