Overview
Salama and Radwan bought legumes, cereals, cereal products and two brands of packaged fried potatoes in markets across Alexandria and measured cadmium, lead, copper and zinc by flame AAS on a dry-weight basis. Cadmium exceeded the 0.05 mg/kg reference the authors used in most foods. Lead was above 0.2 mg/kg in broad beans, common bean, lupine, fenugreek, rice, wheat, spaghetti and pasta.
Key numbers
- Wheat: cadmium 0.131 ± 0.02 and lead 0.398 ± 0.18 mg/kg d.w. (mean ± SE, Table 2).
- Pasta: lead 0.299 ± 0.13 mg/kg; spaghetti lead 0.245 mg/kg (Table 2).
- Pizza crust: cadmium 0.123 and lead 0.176 mg/kg; salted biscuits cadmium 0.122 and lead 0.127 mg/kg (Table 2).
- Packaged fried potatoes: cadmium 0.054-0.100 and lead 0.065-0.159 mg/kg across two brands (Table 2).
Methods (brief)
Each food was a composite of two 5 kg purchases. Wet items were oven dried, then all samples were dry ashed at 550 °C and read by air-acetylene flame AAS. Reagent blanks were used, and spike recoveries were 87 to 100 percent. No certified reference material is reported. Results are means ± standard error on a dry-weight basis.
Evidence Fitness
An older single-city survey with one composite per food, no collection dates and no reference material. The printed flame AAS detection limits look optimistically low. Whole and split lentils show identical cadmium and lead values, which may be a transcription error. The PDF prints no DOI and gives volume 17(1), while the DOI string refers to volume 12. For the thin pages these are proxies only. Pizza crust stands in for cheese-pizza, salted biscuits for wheat-cereal-biscuits, flour products for pie-crust and doughnut, and packaged fried potatoes for cream-of-potato-soup and root-vegetable-purees. Dry legumes stand in for canned-green-beans. None of those pages is linked.