Ask a question about heavy metals in food. Every answer is grounded in cited Heavy Metal Index pages — no outside knowledge, no hallucination. If the corpus doesn't carry evidence on your question, you'll see a "no evidence loaded" reply rather than a guess.
Try one of these:
Supply chain
Supply-chain pages describe the paths by which heavy metals enter the food system, and which sources put them there. Coverage includes soil geochemistry and agricultural uptake; the aquatic pathway by which metals reach fish, shellfish, and seaweed; atmospheric deposition from smelting, mining, shipping, traffic, and aviation; irrigation water, sewage sludge, biosolids, and fertilisers as anthropogenic inputs to cropland; food-contact equipment and packaging; and the source-attribution evidence that apportions an ambient burden among the industries that created it. Pages link to the downstream ingredients and products affected, and to the regulations governing inputs. The load-bearing rule across every page in this section is that an upstream concentration, in soil, water, sediment, air, or an emission inventory, is never a food concentration and is never promoted into the measured food-occurrence record or the certification thresholds.
Aquatic bioaccumulation of heavy metals Uptake from water and sediment is the dominant pathway by which heavy metals enter the seafood half of the food system, and for several elements it is the dominant pathway into the human diet overall.
Atmospheric deposition of heavy metals A second upstream pathway runs in parallel to root uptake from soil, and for some elements it is the one that explains the contamination a food carries.
Irrigation water and soil amendments as anthropogenic inputs to cropland Where the soil-to-plant transfer hub describes how metals already present in soil move into the edible crop, this page is about what humans add to the agricultural system in the first place.
Source attribution and environmental burden apportionment The other supply-chain hubs in this index follow a metal from the environment into the food: soil to plant, water to fish, deposition to leaf.
Soil-to-plant transfer of heavy metals Root uptake from soil is the dominant pathway by which cadmium, arsenic, nickel, and a large share of the lead found in plant-derived foods enter the food system.