Overview
Tabatabae and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, mercury, nickel, lead and zinc by ICP-OES in 36 Taftoon, Lavash and Sangak breads from Zahedan bakeries in June 2020, and estimated hazard indices and cancer risks. Table 4 gives the mean, minimum and maximum per bread type, but its unit label does not fit its numbers.
Key numbers
- Taftoon: lead mean 173.045, range 113.82 to 221.85; cadmium mean 10.351 (Table 4, printed as mg/kg).
- Lavash: lead mean 39.926; Sangak: lead mean 34.055 (Table 4, printed as mg/kg).
- Hazard index for children: Taftoon 2.16, Lavash 1.68, Sangak 1.71 (Table 7).
Methods (brief)
Bread was oven-dried at 50 °C, ground and sieved, digested with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide on a hot plate, and analyzed by ICP-OES. Duplicate analyses with CV below 3%; spike recoveries 86 to 103%. No certified reference material.
Evidence Fitness
Table 4 is labelled mg/kg, but values such as cadmium 10 mg/kg and chromium 148 to 252 mg/kg are implausible for bread, and the paper’s own daily-dose table only matches if the values are µg/kg. The concentrations are therefore flagged and not stored as values. Per-type sample counts are not given. Arsenic and mercury are totals. Leavened and unleavened Iranian flatbreads are a proxy only for chapattis, cheese-crackers, pie-crust, sugar-cookies, wheat-cereal-biscuits and white-cake; those pages are not linked.