Overview
Todorovska and colleagues measured arsenic, cadmium, lead, copper and zinc by atomic absorption spectrometry in 36 samples: fresh beef, pork and chicken, pork and beef sausages, chicken hot dogs, canned meat cuts, beef and chicken soup concentrates, frozen hake and trout, and canned sardine. Each table prints the three individual sample values per food in µg/kg.
Key numbers
- Fresh beef: lead 92, 96 and 80 µg/kg; cadmium 10, 47 and 30 µg/kg (Table 1).
- Fresh pork: lead 90, 92 and 84 µg/kg; chicken: lead 42, 54 and 80 µg/kg (Table 1).
- Canned meat cuts: lead 508, 487 and 440 µg/kg (Table 3).
- Frozen hake: arsenic 542 to 726 µg/kg (Table 5).
Methods (brief)
Wet digestion with nitric acid; flame AAS for copper and zinc, hydride generation AAS for arsenic and graphite furnace AAS for cadmium and lead. Detection limits are given per technique in solution (printed “g/L”, read as µg/L). No certified reference material, recovery or replicate data are reported, and the wet or dry basis is not stated.
Evidence Fitness
Very small sample (three units per food) with no analytical quality control reported. The authors call all values compliant, yet canned meat cuts lead (440 to 508 µg/kg) is above the common EU maximum for meat of 100 µg/kg; zinc values look low for meat. Arsenic is total arsenic. Fresh beef, pork and chicken are direct evidence for meat-and-poultry. The meat and soup concentrate results are only a proxy for turkey-luncheon-meat, brown-gravy and vegetable-beef-soup, which are not linked.