Lead concentrations of herbs used in Van Herby cheese.

Van Herby Cheese is a traditional milk product including local herb species in eastern Turkey. This special milk product was previously produced only for the local market, but industrial scale production and marketing have recently started in the region. However, some quality characteristics such as microbial flora and heavy metal concentrations of this novel product need to be investigated. In this study, lead concentrations of 28 different herbs mostly used in Van Herby Cheese were analyzed by AAS. The highest lead concentration of 1.69 mg kg(-1) of the analyzed herbs was found in Mentha longifolia (L.) Hudson subsp. longifolia.