Unregulated health foods sold through underground radio stations based on hosts' recommendations and anecdotal guarantees are jeopardizing public health, but the real problem lies with overly strict laws on health foods, legislators said yesterday.
Some legislators proposed loosening laws regulating health foods because only 46 products had been approved since 1999, when the Health Food Control Act (
"Strict regulations disadvantage Taiwan's biotech industry, resulting in uncontrolled selling of such products in the south," Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wang Chung-yu (
Wang said regulations needed to be revised because health foods seemed to be regarded as pharmaceuticals by the Department of Health.
The legislators suggested that certain products deserve to be approved as long as they meet standards laid out in the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法).
People First Party (PFP) Legislator Kao Ming-chien (
Kao estimated that people spent NT$15 million on health foods every year.
"It's difficult to verify the curative effects of health food products. We should amend the law to allow vendors to sell health foods by adding warnings on the products," Kao said.
Health officials said yesterday that that health food needs to be regulated carefully.
According to Chen Lu-hung (陳陸宏), director-general of the department's Bureau of Food Sanitation, the legislators wanted to loosen the Health Food Control Act to speed up the approval process.
"In the future, vendors of health food products can apply for approval as long as they have scientific evidence showing that the products are safe," Chen said.
Former Environmental Protection Administration chief Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) held a press conference yesterday to criticize legislators' proposals, saying the Department of Health should check all health food products strictly.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching