Overview
Sharma and Bisla bought commonly eaten vegetables (spinach, taro leaves, onion, potato, taro root, beans, jackfruit, pumpkin) and fruits (jamun, printed as blackberry, mango and pear) from four market sites in Bareilly, India, and measured aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury by AAS on a dry-weight basis. The authors report that arsenic, lead and mercury exceeded their chosen limits in every food.
Key numbers
- Spinach: aluminum 2.300, arsenic 1.500, cadmium 1.180, lead 1.100, mercury 0.200 mg/kg dry weight (Table 3).
- Taro root: lead 1.120 and mercury “1.280±0.010” mg/kg (Table 3).
- Pumpkin: arsenic 0.060, cadmium 0.220, lead 0.140 mg/kg (Table 3).
Methods (brief)
Edible portions cleaned without washing, oven dried at 80 °C, digested with nitric, sulfuric and perchloric acids on a hot plate, and analysed by graphite furnace AAS. No detection limits, reference materials or recoveries are reported.
Evidence Fitness
Pooled market means with uniformly small standard deviations and no sample counts. The absence of quality control, mercury measured without a stated cold-vapor step, and a potato cadmium value the text calls undetected all lower confidence; values are dry weight. Individual vegetables are a proxy for vegetables-mixed: the paper does not measure a mixed-vegetable product, so it is not linked to that page. Pumpkin is linked through the squash page.