Assessment of the Safe Consumption of Nuts in Terms of the Content of Toxic Elements with Chemometric Analysis

Nuts are characterized by high nutritional value and are recommended as a part of a healthy diet. At the same time, toxic elements could also be found in them. In this research, we measured the content of As, Cd, Pb and Hg in a wide variety of edible nuts. To determine the As content, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was applied. Cd and Pb were detected by the electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry analytical technique (ETAAS) with Zeeman background correction, while atomic absorption spectrometry method (AAS) with the amalgamation technique in the case of Hg was used. The study material consisted of 120 samples without replications (10 for each subgroup) including the following nuts: almonds, Brazil nuts, cashew nuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, peanuts, pecan nuts, pine nuts, pistachios and walnuts. Indicators such as the target hazard quotient (THQ), cancer risk (CR) and hazard index (HI) were used to assess the health risk. The highest median As, Cd, Pb and Hg contents were observed for pistachios (192.42 µg/kg), pine nuts (238.40 µg/kg), peanuts (82.06 µg/kg) and pecans (82.06 µg/kg), respectively. The exceedance of the established limits was found in the case of Pb for nine samples: macadamia nuts (221.49 µg/kg; 2350.94 µg/kg; 2581.43 µg/kg), pine nuts (266.33 µg/kg), peanuts (1353.80 µg/kg) and pecans (2689.13 µg/kg, 2758.26 µg/kg, 2992.29 µg/kg and 3169.41 µg/kg). Extremely high (>2500 µg/kg) Pb content was found in 33% of studied pecans imported from the USA. The health risk indicators did not identify increased health risk. This research is significant considering the food safety issues and indicates the need to regularly control the content of toxic elements in food, as well as to establish the specific limits for heavy metals content in nuts. The chemometric analysis included cluster analysis and principal component analysis (PCA). Cluster analysis made it possible to distinguish four subgroups on the basis of the ability to accumulate toxic elements: pine nuts, pecans, pistachios and other analysed nuts. PCA indicated primarily factor 1, distinguishing mainly pecans, macadamia nuts and peanuts. Chemometric analysis can be a useful tool in estimating the ability of different nut species to accumulate contaminants.

Evaluation and determination of occupational and environmental exposure of lead in workplace air and human workers based dispersive ionic liquid solid phase micro extraction in battery manufacturing factories from Iran

The exposure of lead in workplace air and human workers of battery manufacturing factory was evaluated determined by nanotechnology since 2019-2020. Human whole blood (HWB) for subject and healthy peoples (25-55, Men, 40 N) and workplace air (40N) was prepared based on NIOSH sampling. 10 mL of HWB samples added to 20 mg of mixture ionic liquid/ ligand ([HMIM][PF6]/APDC) modified on graphene oxide nanostructures(GONs) at pH=6. After sonication, the lead ions separated/extracted by dispersive ionic liquid solid phase micro extraction (DIL-SPME) and determined by flame atomic absorption spectrometry (F-AAS). All air samples in workplace were analyzed based on NIOSH process. The results showed us the negative correlation between Pb concentration in human blood subject and healthy peoples (r=0.24). The range concentrations of lead in human subject, healthy peoples and workplace air were obtained 193.4-543.7 µg L-1, 85.6-175.9 µgL-1 and 44.7-81.5 µgm-3, respectively. The LOD, linear rang, enrichment factor(EF) and RSD% were achieved 1.25 µg L-1, 5.0- 310 µg L-1, 19.6 and less than 5% by procedure. The method was validated by standard reference material (SRM), the electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ET-AAS) and ICP-MS analyzer for human samples.