Overview
Zheng and colleagues at the Zhejiang CDC measured 11 elements by ICP-MS in 35 retail prepared (ready-to-cook) livestock and poultry meat dishes, each a composite of nine packages from three cities. Aluminum was the most abundant element; lead, cadmium and arsenic were low, nickel was never detected, and all dishes met China’s GB 2762-2022 limits. Deep-fried products tended to carry more metals than stir-fried or boiled dishes.
Key numbers
- Lead: detected in 48.6% of dishes; Q3 0.031 mg/kg; highest outlier 0.167 mg/kg in sweet and sour pork (Table 5; Section 3.3).
- Cadmium: detected in 25.7%; highest outlier 0.020 mg/kg in a vegetable chicken patty (Table 5).
- Arsenic: median 0.003 mg/kg; highest 0.47 mg/kg in a codfish cake containing pork loin (Table 5).
- Aluminum: median 3.88 mg/kg; maximum 22.4 mg/kg in sweet and sour pork (Table 5).
Methods (brief)
Microwave nitric acid digestion and ICP-MS. LODs were 0.020 mg/kg for lead, 0.0021 mg/kg for cadmium and arsenic (Table 3). Accuracy was checked with SRM 1577c and GBW10018, all within certified ranges. Non-detects were set to half the LOD before computing medians and quartiles, so several medians are imputed values.
Evidence Fitness
A recent, well-controlled survey, but each value is a composite across stores and the paper reports only medians, quartiles and named outliers, not per-dish results. Dishes mix chicken, pork, beef and fish. For the thin pages it was pulled for (chicken broth, chicken noodle soup, vegetable beef soup), this is a cooked meat dish proxy; no soups or broths were measured.