A magazine yesterday alleged that edible oil and sauce packs from instant noodles products from six companies contained residual traces of heavy metals.
The Chinese-language Business Today magazine said it tested the oil packs following comments made by edible oil businesspeople that “the oil packs in instant noodles have even greater problems” amid the recent edible oil scandal.
At the end of last month, the magazine purchased instant noodles from supermarkets and hypermarkets around Taipei and sent the oil packs they contained to SGS Taiwan for laboratory testing.
Of the seven products sent for testing, the sauce packs from a chicken noodle soup and a beef noodle soup product made by Vedan contained minute traces of copper, a sauce pack from the Wu Mu brand contained traces of arsenic and copper, and a spicy beef noodle product’s sauce pack from Master Kong, a sauce pack from a Shin Ramyun product, and a pickled cabbage and beef noodle soup product’s sauce pack from Uni President’s were found to contain traces of arsenic, copper and lead.
A rice noodle product from A-she brand had also been found to contain the aforementioned heavy metals and also traces of mercury, the magazine said.
The report also included an interview with the Consumers’ Foundation’s editor committee, which said that though it was inevitable that residues of the more toxic heavy metals would appear in foodstuffs, once the amount of residues exceeded the human body’s level of tolerance they would disrupt the normal biological functions.
An unnamed committee member interviewed by the magazine also said that as there were no standards for heavy metal residues in sauce packs for instant noodles in the country, it was impossible to tell whether or not the residual amounts in the sauce packs exceeded human tolerance levels.
In response, the brands named in the report said that the residues of heavy metals found in the sauces packs were common in the environment and in other foodstuffs, adding that as the sauces were made from plants, fruit and natural oils, the residual amounts were well within legal standards and there was no reason for consumers to be concerned about the report.
The brands also said that as the government had not set a legal limit on the levels of trace metals in the products, the discovery of the metals had no legal ramifications.
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