In recent years, the spotlight on the safety of baby food has intensified, driven by growing concerns about toxic heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. These elements, even in low concentrations, pose significant health risks to infants and toddlers, whose developing bodies are particularly vulnerable. As regulatory standards tighten, advanced analytical techniques such as inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) have emerged as crucial tools in ensuring baby food meets stringent safety and nutritional benchmarks.<h4>The importance of monitoring heavy metals in baby food</h4>Heavy metals can make their way into baby food through environmental contamination, agricultural practices, or industrial processes. For instance:<ul><li>Lead can leach from soil into crops.</li><li>Arsenic is often present in rice and rice-based products due to its natural occurrence in water and soil.</li><li>Mercury can accumulate in fish and seafood.</li><li>Cadmium is introduced via contaminated soil or fertilizers.</li></ul>Even trace amounts of these metals can lead to neurological damage, developmental delays, and other long-term health issues. Regulatory bodies like the FDA and the European Union have established maximum permissible levels for these toxic elements. For example, the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021 in the U.S. mandates maximum limits such as 10 µg/kg for inorganic arsenic and 5 µg/kg for lead in baby food products.<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/Thermo_Fisher_Scientific_Ensuring_Baby_Food_Safety_Tackling_Toxic_Metals_with_Advanced_Technology_275fac6f68.jpg" alt="Thermo Fisher Scientific: Ensuring Baby Food Safety - Tackling Toxic Metals with Advanced Technology" srcset="https://storage.googleapis.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/thumbnail_Thermo_Fisher_Scientific_Ensuring_Baby_Food_Safety_Tackling_Toxic_Metals_with_Advanced_Technology_275fac6f68.jpg 239w," sizes="100vw" width="1536" height="1006"><h4>The role of ICP-MS in baby food safety</h4>To comply with these regulations, manufacturers require robust analytical methods that offer high sensitivity, precision, and reproducibility. ICP-MS, particularly when paired with advanced sample preparation techniques, has become the gold standard for detecting and quantifying both toxic and essential trace elements in baby food.<h4>A streamlined workflow</h4>A recent study showcased a comprehensive workflow using the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/products/1488">Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ MTX ICP-MS</a> system:<ul><li>Sample preparation: Baby food samples, ranging from dry powders to high-fat and high-moisture items, were processed using microwave-assisted acid digestion. This method ensures uniform preparation and minimizes manual handling.</li><li>Automated dilution: The system’s argon gas dilution (AGD) capability allowed for a consistent five-fold dilution of all samples, accommodating a wide variety of matrices without compromising detection sensitivity.</li><li>Interference management: By leveraging triple quadrupole modes with reactive gases, the ICP-MS effectively suppressed polyatomic and isobaric interferences, ensuring accurate results even for challenging elements like arsenic and mercury.</li><li>Quality control: Calibration curves and internal standard checks maintained accuracy throughout the analysis, with all results aligning within regulatory limits.</li></ul><h4>Key findings</h4>The study analyzed six baby food products, including fruit purees, cereal, yogurt, and fish-based meals. While most samples adhered to safety standards, certain findings highlighted areas for further attention:<ul><li>Arsenic: Elevated levels were detected in salmon-based purees, attributed to organic arsenic compounds naturally present in fish.</li><li>Cadmium and lead: Slightly elevated levels in carrot-based products underscore the need for rigorous soil testing and monitoring.</li></ul><h4>Benefits of advanced ICP-MS analysis</h4>Beyond regulatory compliance, ICP-MS offers additional advantages:<ul><li>Nutritional assessment: Simultaneous analysis of essential nutrients like calcium, iron, and zinc ensures baby food supports healthy growth.</li><li>Efficiency and productivity: The automated workflow minimizes operator intervention, making it suitable for high-throughput laboratories.</li><li>Reliability: Consistent results across diverse sample types build confidence in food safety and quality.</li></ul><h4>Conclusion</h4>Ensuring the safety of baby food is not just a regulatory requirement—it’s a responsibility to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. By harnessing the power of ICP-MS, manufacturers can confidently address both safety concerns and nutritional needs, delivering products that parents can trust. As technology continues to evolve, such advancements promise a future where baby food safety is guaranteed, one analysis at a time.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/cz/en/home/industrial/mass-spectrometry/inductively-coupled-plasma-mass-spectrometry-icp-ms/quadrupole-icp-ms-systems.html">Explore more</a>: Learn how the Thermo Scientific iCAP MTX ICP-MS system is setting new standards in trace metals analysis for food safety.

Ensuring Baby Food Safety: Tackling Toxic Metals with Advanced Technology

Reactivity and fluxes of antimony in a macrotidal estuarine salinity gradient: Insights from single and triple quadrupole ICP-MS performances

As countries across the world accelerate their efforts to move away from fossil fuels, lithium-ion batteries have rapidly become established as a key component in the drive to greener energy alternatives. But lithium is only part of the story. In this blog post, I’ll review the role that lithium and other elements play in battery technology, discuss how these elements can be quantified and assess what potential options there are for future developments in this area.<h3>Lithium ion batteries – their promise and their problems</h3>Lithium ion battery cathodes are typically made from a mixed metal oxide base to which lithium is added and, usually, nickel, cobalt and manganese oxides are used for this purpose. To maintain optimum performance and to slow degradation of cathode materials over multiple charging and discharging cycles as much as possible, these materials need to be highly purified. In particular, they must be free of metal impurities (particularly iron and vanadium) and sulphur, as these elements disrupt battery performance and accelerate degradation processes. Lithium ion batteries have become a central focus for power generation for electric vehicles and portable devices because they offer high-power storage capacity for their size and good charge/discharge cycling stability over a relatively long time period. However, there are safety concerns surrounding lithium ion batteries, as they can spontaneously ignite and subsequently explode as a result of overheating.This overheating can be caused by factors such as electrical shorting, rapid discharge, overcharging or mechanical damage, so considerable research and development in recent years has been focused on making them as safe as possible. Safety is not the only problem for batteries based on lithium. Although the price of lithium batteries has decreased significantly (by almost 90% between 2010 and 2020, according to some estimates1), since January this year, the price of lithium raw materials (primarily lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide) has been rising steadily. Lithium is not a limitless resource on Earth — it’s present at levels of only between 0.002 – 0.006 wt% in the Earth’s crust — so as demand ramps up, supply will diminish and costs will rise. The cost is not only a financial one. Mining activities will need to sharply increase if dependence on lithium is maintained, which will significantly impact the environment in areas where lithium deposits are rich enough for mining to be viable. This, however, also means that recycling and reprocessing of spent batteries will become an essential part of the lithium battery cycle.<h3>Are there alternative metal ion technologies to lithium?</h3>In the initial stages of lithium ion battery research in the 1970s and early 1980s, the potential of sodium ion batteries was also investigated.2 Sodium has the considerable benefit of being much more widely available than lithium — it’s the seventh most abundant element, with an average concentration of 2.27% by weight in the Earth’s crust — and so cheaper and more viable to extract from almost anywhere. However, it soon became clear at the time that the power density and charge/discharge cycling stability of sodium ion batteries was not as good, in part because the larger ionic radius of sodium means that the graphite anodes that are efficiently used with lithium ion batteries cannot be used with sodium batteries. As a result, sodium battery research languished for many years until, in the early 2010s, interest in this area resurged because of increasing battery demand and the discovery that hard carbon3 provided better anode performance with sodium ions. There is still a long way to go with sodium ion battery development, but promising advances are happening now. In June 2020, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announced that they had developed a viable sodium ion battery4, and Stanford University is spearheading research into new sodium ion-based battery materials.5<h3>Measuring lithium and other metals involved in battery technology</h3>It’s clear that accurate determination and quantification of both the cathode metal oxide elements and trace impurities in the cathode material are of key importance for advancing and scaling up battery production, research and development. The techniques that are available for this analysis include <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/products?category=251&amp;manufacturerItems=3">inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES)</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/products?category=232&amp;manufacturerItems=3">inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)</a>, and recently, the applications team at Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Bremen, Germany, facility have produced an application note on <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/an_73872_icp_oes_elements_lithium_batteries_an73872_en_691a4c3f8a.pdf">analysis of trace elements in lithium batteries</a> using the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/BRE0020758#/BRE0020758">Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ PRO XP ICP-OES</a>. If you’d like to learn more about how these and other technologies that can support battery technology advancements, take a look at our batteries resources page <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/batteries">here</a>.

Is Battery Technology Just All About Lithium?

Life is often about making a choice or the best possible compromise between two aspects that seem to stand diametrically opposed to each other. For example, staying out late for dinner with friends while planning a long hike the following day with an early start. Either of these activities provides great pleasure, but combining both on the same weekend may not be the best idea. I come across many similar challenges almost every week, and each time I need to make a choice that seems to be the most promising in a given situation.The same is true in some cases for analysis using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). While many questions about removing interferences were answered by my colleague <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.analyteguru.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/58">Simon Nelms</a> in his blogs, I would like to state here that most laboratories performing applied analytical testing of, for example, water samples or foodstuffs, mostly rely on single quadrupole-based ICP-MS, such as the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/IQLAAGGAAQFAQKMBIT#/IQLAAGGAAQFAQKMBIT">Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ RQ ICP-MS</a>, due to their robustness, ease of use and speed of analysis.Single quadrupole-based instruments remove all interferences using inert helium as a collision gas and kinetic energy discrimination (KED). The QCell collision/reaction cell (CRC) has two important advantages for this setup: High ion transmission across the full mass range (so that light elements such as lithium and beryllium can also be measured with the lowest detection limits), and an automatically adjusted low mass cutoff to further suppress backgrounds. More information on how KED removes interferences can be found <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/document-connect/document-connect.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.thermofisher.com%2FTFS-Assets%2FCMD%2Fbrochures%2Fsn-44415-icp-ms-single-quadrupole-sn44415-en.pdf&amp;title=U21hcnQgTm90ZTogVHJhY2UgRWxlbWVudHMgaW4gUm91dGluZSBTYW1wbGUgTWF0cmljZXMgVXNpbmcgU2luZ2xlIFF1YWRydXBvbGUgaUNBUCBSUSBJQ1AtTVM=">here</a>. Using a single collision gas for all analytes means that the time required for fill/flush cycle in the CRC can be cut from the method, and sample turnover times as low as 45 seconds for a multi-element analysis are feasible.In turn, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/industrial/mass-spectrometry/liquid-chromatography-mass-spectrometry-lc-ms/lc-ms-systems/triple-quadrupole-lc-ms.html">triple quadrupole</a> ICP-MS systems, like the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/731546#/731546">Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ TQ ICP-MS</a>, may use a larger variety of gases for interference removal, among them helium, oxygen, hydrogen or ammonia. With dedicated measurement modes set up for specific analytes, superior interference removal is accomplished, allowing you to tackle challenging sample matrices and eliminating difficult interferences (such as doubly charged or isobaric interferences). However, each mode and each gas switch adds a few seconds to the method, so that a fully blown method using all available options may end up with extended sample turnover times, which may not be acceptable in a busy laboratory.<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/Thermo_Fisher_Scientific_Is_There_a_Way_to_Improve_Both_Data_Quality_and_Productivity_in_2_8079c12318.jpg" alt="Thermo Fisher Scientific: Is There a Way to Improve Both Data Quality and Productivity in." srcset="https://storage.googleapis.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/thumbnail_Thermo_Fisher_Scientific_Is_There_a_Way_to_Improve_Both_Data_Quality_and_Productivity_in_2_8079c12318.jpg 245w," sizes="100vw" width="815" height="324">Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ TQe ICP-MSWhile the inherent complexity of setting up a method has been reduced by innovative software tools, like the Reaction Finder method development assistant available in the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/products/1489">Thermo Scientific™ Qtegra™ Intelligent Scientific Data Solution™ Software</a>, complex installation requirements and analysis times have been a barrier for adoption of triple quadrupole ICP-MS systems in applied testing laboratories.So is there again only a choice between two aspects of technology that seem to be incompatible with each other? Well, there is a new way to combine the superior interference removal of a triple quadrupole with the speed of a single quadrupole.The application experts in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Center of Excellence for Mass Spectrometry in Bremen, Germany, have recently developed a new method based on the use of oxygen as the only reactive gas in a method designed for a triple quadrupole ICP-MS system. Oxygen provides a wealth of chemical reactions to fully eliminate all interferences on common contaminants (such as chromium, arsenic, cadmium and mercury), but also provides comparable performance for elements not immediately benefitting from this reactive gas (e.g., typical matrix elements such as sodium, potassium, calcium or iron).At the same time, sample turnover times of just a little more than 1 minute are possible, so that several hundreds of samples can be analyzed during a shift, with no concerns about sample re-runs or data quality. The team has used a<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/BRE731556#/BRE731556"> Thermo Scientific™ iCAP™ TQe ICP-MS</a>, an instrument designed specifically for laboratories looking to improve both interference removal and productivity. Independent of the matrix, this instrument allows you to overcome all current challenges, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://icpms.labrulez.com/labrulez-bucket-strapi-h3hsga3/AN_43446_TQ_ICP_MS_Food_Apple_Tomato_Leaves_AN_43446_EN_9674d8e0c0.pdf">for example in the analysis of foodstuffs</a>, and sets the lab up for increased sample loads or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/document-connect/document-connect.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.thermofisher.com%2FTFS-Assets%2FCMD%2FApplication-Notes%2Fan-44479-icp-ms-rare-earth-elements-contaminants-an44479-en.pdf&amp;title=QXBwbGljYXRpb24gTm90ZTogSW50ZWdyYXRpb24gb2YgUmFyZSBFYXJ0aCBFbGVtZW50cyAoUkVFKSBpbnRvIGEgTm92ZWwgSUNQLU1TIE1ldGhvZCBmb3IgRW52aXJvbm1lbnRhbCBBbmFseXNpcw==">new sets of analytes</a> waiting to be taken on.If you would like to know more about how to overcome the seemingly impregnable gap between superior interference removal and productivity in the busy laboratory, please check out the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/BRE731556#/BRE731556">iCAP TQe ICP-MS</a>.

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