Overview
Swinden’s PhD thesis maps cadmium in the Australian wheat crop and follows it through laboratory, pilot and commercial milling into flour, offal fractions and bread. The abstract reports higher cadmium in Western Australian wheat, linked to sandy acid soils, and near a zinc smelter at Port Pirie. Milling moved cadmium out of the flour streams and into bran, pollard and germ, in step with ash content, and wholemeal breads had more cadmium than white breads.
Key numbers
No findings were recorded. The abstract summarises silo wheat at up to 0.05 mg/kg cadmium in parts of Western Australia (Abstract, p. ii), but these are summary figures and the chapter tables were not read.
Methods (brief)
Nitric acid digestion with graphite furnace AAS, validated with a wheat flour reference material, spikes, duplicates, control charts and collaborative trials (per the abstract).
Evidence Fitness
A non-peer-reviewed thesis, held as context only: per the owner’s rule, abstract-level numbers are not used as findings. It is useful background on how milling partitions cadmium. It measures wheat, flour fractions and bread, not pasta or cake, so the whole-wheat-pasta and white-cake pages are not linked.