Overview
Zhou and Liu collected 130 dried chili pepper samples in 2023 from the main production bases in nine regions of Guizhou Province and measured arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead by ICP-MS. The main text prints overall means and the means for regions that exceeded China’s GB 2762-2022 limits. Full regional tables are only in the supplement, which was not available.
Key numbers
- All regions: lead 0.8949 ± 0.266 mg/kg, cadmium 0.0627 ± 0.017 mg/kg, arsenic 0.3287 ± 0.093 mg/kg, chromium 0.9540 ± 0.301 mg/kg (Abstract, p. 1).
- Qiandongnan: lead 1.894 ± 0.536 mg/kg and cadmium 0.157 ± 0.037 mg/kg, the highest of the regions (Results, p. 4).
- Liupanshui cadmium 0.115 ± 0.037 mg/kg; Anshun lead 1.486 ± 0.445 mg/kg (Results, p. 4).
Methods (brief)
Samples were oven-dried at 70 °C, ground, microwave-digested in nitric acid and analyzed on a Thermo iCAP-Q ICP-MS. QA used reagent blanks, duplicates (relative deviation under 5%) and spike recoveries of 90.8 to 115%. Detection limits are not printed in the main text.
Evidence Fitness
A large regional sample from mining-affected and ordinary areas, with ICP-MS and reasonable QA. Only text-printed regional values are used. One sentence labels a Qiandongnan value of 0.578 mg/kg as cadmium, but it matches the arsenic limit context and is recorded as arsenic with a flag. Dried chili is a spice proxy for barbecue-sauce and green-bell-pepper; those pages are not linked.