Overview
Prego and colleagues tested how high-pressure processing (200 to 600 MPa), freezing, six months of frozen storage and canning in brine change the element content of Atlantic chub mackerel muscle. Fish were canned in the laboratory and analyzed by ICP-MS after three months in the can. Lead fell sharply from raw to canned fish, total arsenic rose slightly, and tin rose with canning. Mercury was not measured, and cadmium results appear only in a figure.
Key numbers
- Lead: raw muscle 0.0127 (0.0037) mg/kg dry; canned without pressure treatment 0.0032 (0.0012) at month 0 and 0.0040 (0.0013) mg/kg dry after 6-month frozen storage (Table 4, p. 9).
- Total arsenic: raw 1.02 (0.05); canned 1.12 to 1.47 mg/kg dry across treatments (Table 4, p. 9).
- Tin: raw 0.0011 (0.0006); canned 0.0032 to 0.0053 mg/kg dry (Table 4, p. 8).
Methods (brief)
About 1 g of ground muscle was microwave-digested in nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide (EPA 3050B based) and analyzed by ICP-MS. Accuracy was checked with DORM-2 (lead 0.047 measured vs 0.065 certified; arsenic 17.3 vs 18.0 mg/kg). Results are dry-weight means of three replicates.
Evidence Fitness
A controlled processing experiment, not a retail survey: one fish lot, laboratory canning, dry-weight results. It is direct evidence that canning and storage shift element levels in tinned fish, useful for mitigation, but not for typical market concentrations. The lead CRM recovery was low (about 72%).
Related evidence
Update history
No substantive edit history is available in this build. The full commit record is available in git.