Yu 2023 - Zhejiang beans toxic elements

Yu, Pan, and Han measured arsenic, cadmium, chromium, mercury, and lead in 692 dried bean samples from local commercial markets in Zhejiang Province, southeast China. The bean panel included black bean, broad bean, mung bean, soybean, red bean, kidney bean, and pea. The occurrence measurements are total/unspecified arsenic and total/unspecified mercury; the paper’s health-risk model estimates inorganic arsenic from total arsenic using a 72% assumption from prior crop literature, but it does not measure inorganic arsenic speciation in these bean samples.

Key numbers

The abstract reports average levels across all 692 bean samples of As 0.0349 mg kg−1, Cd 0.0379 mg kg−1, Cr 0.246 mg kg−1, Hg 0.0019 mg kg−1, and Pb 0.0246 mg kg−1. Table 3 reports bean-type statistics in mg/kg:

The Results text identifies the highest mean concentrations as Cd 0.0498 mg/kg in soybean, Cr 0.322 mg/kg in black bean, Hg 0.0027 mg/kg in pea, Pb 0.0498 mg/kg in kidney bean, and As 0.0601 mg/kg in black bean. It also states that all bean types except pea and kidney beans had at least one Cd result exceeding the maximum limit used by the authors, and Cr exceedances occurred in black bean, broad bean, soybean, and kidney bean.

Table 4 reports Monte Carlo target hazard quotients as exposure context, not occurrence values. At P95, total hazard-index sums were children 1.1, teens 1.05, and adults 0.54; the certainty of HI greater than 1 was 12.64% for children, 11.54% for teens, and 1.01% for adults. The model used total arsenic measurements but converted them to inorganic arsenic by assuming 72% of total As was inorganic As.

Methods (brief)

Bean samples were purchased from local commercial markets in Hangzhou, Huzhou, Jiaxing, Jinhua, Lishui, Ningbo, Quzhou, Shaoxing, Taizhou, Wenzhou, and Zhoushan. Ground samples were digested by closed microwave-assisted nitric-acid digestion, dried near dryness at 150 °C, re-diluted to 20 mL, and analyzed by ICP-MS for As, Cd, Cr, Hg, and Pb. Quality control used soybean flour certified reference material GBW10013; reported LOQs were As 0.0006 mg/kg, Cd 0.0008 mg/kg, Cr 0.0006 mg/kg, Hg 0.0001 mg/kg, and Pb 0.0008 mg/kg.

Implications

This source supplies Zhejiang-market dried-bean occurrence evidence for total arsenic, cadmium, total chromium, total mercury, and lead. It is especially useful for beans and soy routing because the sample set includes 104 soybean samples and several other legume categories. Downstream synthesis should keep measured total arsenic separate from the paper’s modeled inorganic-arsenic assumption, and should not treat total chromium as Cr(VI).

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout; abstract, sampling section, quality-control Table 1, Table 3, Table 4, and the results prose were checked in /tmp/f3_texts/foods-12-03300.txt.
• DOI 10.3390/foods12173300, raw handle MFK_foods-12-03300, and cite-key checks found no existing source page before creation.
• Table 3 values are preserved as mg/kg; no conversion to dry-weight normalized or wet-weight units was performed.
• Speciation: arsenic was measured as total/unspecified As and mercury as total/unspecified Hg. The source’s health-risk model assumes 72% inorganic arsenic, but the occurrence data are not measured iAs.
• Brand firewall: samples were purchased from markets but no brand-level contamination values are reported.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; narrow slugs for black bean, broad bean, mung bean, red bean, kidney bean, and pea are not available, so broad beans/legumes routing is used with soy added for soybean rows.

Page history

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