Quantitative Detection of Toxic Elements in Food Samples by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS)

With industrial development, food safety problems occur frequently. The contamination of harmful elements in food has received widespread attention, especially heavy metal elements such as lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals proven toxic to human health. As one of the most sensitive and accurate analytical techniques for trace element detection, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) has become an indispensable key technology in the field of food safety testing due to its ability to accurately determine the ppb/ppt level toxic elements in food and analyze the morphology of the elements, and the number of applications in the literature continues to grow remarkably (e.g., the average annual growth rate in the last decade has reached 12–15%), which supports the risk assessment and regulation. It has become an indispensable key technology in this field. In this review, the research progress of ICP-MS in the detection of hazardous elements in food is summarized, focusing on the basic principles of the technique, sample pretreatment methods, and common interference issues. The specific applications of ICP-MS in different types of food (e.g., cereals, aquatic products, vegetables, and dairy products) are also summarized. The main challenges in the current application of ICP-MS are also discussed, including matrix effect, stability of morphological transformation, and standardization issues. It is expected that the development of ICP-MS in portability, automation, and high-throughput detection has brought potential for its applications in food safety detection.