Overview
Sayegh and colleagues bought 40 cornflake products at retail outlets in the United Arab Emirates in summer 2022 and measured 13 elements by ICP-MS. Mean lead was 353.4 ug/kg, with every product at or above 296.6 ug/kg; mean arsenic was 80.5, cadmium 35.2 and mercury 5.0 ug/kg. Product category made little difference, except that natural-flavored products had more lead than chocolate-flavored ones. The PDF is the accepted manuscript (article in press).
Key numbers
- Lead mean 353.44 ± 62.49 ug/kg, range 296.62 to 563.65 (Table 5).
- Total arsenic mean 80.53 ± 98.43 ug/kg, range 11.87 to 572.95; cadmium mean 35.18 ± 9.64, range 17.79 to 66.12 (Table 5).
- Lead median 320.44 ug/kg in chocolate-flavored vs 363.18 in natural-flavored products, p = 0.03 (Table 7).
Methods (brief)
Microwave digestion of 0.5 g ground cereal in nitric acid, hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid; ICP-MS in helium collision mode following EPA 6020B; triplicate measurements. Accuracy checked with rice flour (IRMM-804) and fortified breakfast cereal (SRM 3233) reference materials, with lead recovery 109 percent; spike recoveries 94 to 102 percent.
Evidence Fitness
A good-sized retail sample with reference-material QA, but internal inconsistencies weaken it: unit labels switch between mg/kg and ug/kg, the stated exceedance shares cannot be reproduced from the per-product table, and lead shows an unusual floor near 300 ug/kg in all 40 products. Accepted manuscript, not the final version. For crisped-rice-cereal this is a proxy: cornflakes are a corn-based breakfast cereal and no crisped rice product was measured.