Redan 2023 - U.S. plant-milk alternatives elements

Redan and colleagues measured target minerals and trace elements in eight types of plant-based milk alternatives from the U.S. market. The occurrence-relevant contaminant elements were total arsenic, cadmium, and lead, measured after microwave-assisted acid digestion by ICP-MS. The arsenic result is total arsenic only; the paper explicitly states that it did not differentiate organic and inorganic arsenic species.

Key numbers

Table 1 reports the product-unit sample frame:

Method LOQs for the contaminant elements were 9.9 ug/kg for arsenic, 2.3 ug/kg for cadmium, and 6.0 ug/kg for lead.

The source reports these contaminant findings:

In the discussion, the authors state that rice PBMAs had the highest total arsenic concentrations and hemp PBMAs were second highest. Both hemp brands were formulated with a rice-based sweetener, brown rice syrup. The paper also states that all sampled products had arsenic amounts below 100 ug/L, a Health Canada ready-to-serve beverage total-arsenic limit cited by the authors.

Methods (brief)

Samples were chosen from commonly consumed PBMA types in the U.S. market as of September 2022 and purchased around Bedford Park, Illinois. Product units were mixed, aliquoted, and stored at -20 °C until analysis. Samples were digested with concentrated nitric acid using a CEM Discover SP-D microwave digestion system and analyzed on an Agilent 8800 ICP-MS. The method was adapted from FDA Elemental Analysis Manual 4.7; SRM 1643f was used for As, Cd, and Pb quality control, and trace-element recovery was between 95-105% of certified values.

Implications

This source provides direct finished-product occurrence evidence for U.S. plant-based milk alternatives, especially the rice-based plant-milk row. Rice PBMAs are the only row with a source-reported mean total arsenic value in the extracted text, while soy PBMAs carry the highest reported cadmium mean. Because arsenic speciation was not performed, the rice PBMA arsenic signal remains tAs and must not be pooled as inorganic arsenic.

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout; title/byline, abstract, sampling methods, ICP-MS methods, Table 1, contaminant Results, Discussion, and Conclusions were checked in /tmp/f3_unrepresented_texts/nihms-1907158.txt.
• DOI 10.1016/j.jfca.2023.105457, raw handle MFK_nihms-1907158, and cite-key searches found no existing source page before creation.
• Units are preserved as source-reported ug/kg; no conversion to ug/L or serving basis was made.
• Speciation: the source reports total arsenic only and states that it did not differentiate organic and inorganic arsenic species. Frontmatter therefore uses tAs, not iAs.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; hemp and pea ingredient slugs are not present, so those product types remain represented by the broad plant-milk product rows.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.