Overview
Stojanović and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead by ICP-MS in canned beef goulash, pork ragout, spam, liver pate and meatballs in tomato sauce stored for up to six years in lacquered tinplate cans, and in ingredients used to make two of them. All products were far below Serbian and EU limits, and storage time had no statistically significant effect. Spices and some additives carried the most cadmium and lead. This PDF is the preprint; the manifest DOI points to the later journal version.
Key numbers
- Liver pate, producer B, stored 3 years: cadmium “35.91” µg/kg, the highest in the study (Table 3, p. 7-8).
- Pork ragout, producer B, stored 5 years 1 month: mercury “15.04” and lead “8.00” µg/kg (Table 3).
- Red ground pepper used for beef goulash: cadmium “163.0” µg/kg; dish supplement used for meatballs: lead “250.0” µg/kg (Tables 5 and 6).
- Tomato sauce ingredient: cadmium “10.0” and lead “20.0” µg/kg (Table 6).
Methods (brief)
Can contents were homogenized, microwave digested and analyzed in duplicate by ICP-MS. LOQs were 4.0 µg/kg for arsenic and lead and 1.0 µg/kg for cadmium and mercury. Bovine liver reference materials gave recoveries of 100.8 to 106.2 percent, and mercury spikes 93.5 to 106.0 percent.
Evidence Fitness
Preprint, not the peer-reviewed version of record, so figures may have changed in the published article. Each storage point is a single can, many results are below LOQ, and the products follow military recipes. Canned meat in sauce is a proxy for brown-gravy; no gravy was measured, and that page is not linked. The text cites a 5 year 5 month sample that Table 3 lists as 5 years 9 months.