Overview
Tutuwa and colleagues collected flour and bread baked in coal or electric ovens in Jalingo, Taraba State, and measured lead, cadmium, chromium, nickel, iron and zinc by atomic absorption spectrometry. Table 1 gives three flours and Table 2 gives mean values for bread from each oven type. Coal-oven bread had more lead and iron than electric-oven bread, but only the iron difference was significant.
Key numbers
- Bread, coal ovens: lead 0.296 ± 0.019 mg/kg; electric ovens: lead 0.181 ± 0.020 mg/kg (Table 2).
- Cadmium and nickel not detected in bread from either oven type (Table 2).
- Flours: lead 0.0154 to 0.0170 mg/kg, cadmium not detected (Table 1).
Methods (brief)
Bread was air-dried, oven-dried at 60 °C and powdered; 1.0 g was digested in hydrochloric and perchloric acid and read by AAS in triplicate. No detection limit, reference material or recovery is reported, and the number of bread samples per oven type is not stated.
Evidence Fitness
Small and thinly described: no sample counts per group, no detection limit and no reference material. Iron and zinc are far below normal bread values. The flour table nearly matches the flour table of the same group’s Makurdi paper (joseph2024-makurdi-bread-heavy-metals), so the two should not be treated as independent flour data. Published online in December 2023 in an issue dated April 2024. Bread and flour are a proxy for white cake, so the white-cake page is not linked.