The Hsinchu City Government yesterday instructed the manufacturers and sellers of seven vegetable oil products used for deep frying to recall the items after they were found to contain excessive levels of trans fats and heavy metals.
“The seven oil products come from six brands and account for nearly 90 percent of the nation’s deep-frying vegetable oil market. They are mostly used by restaurants, eateries and street vendors,” city consumer ombudsman Liu Hsing-chen (劉興振) told a press conference in Hsinchu.
The products in question included Taisun Enterprise’s (泰山企業) Quality Frying Oil (鮮榨的番好炸油), Taiwan Sugar’s (台灣糖業) Frying Oil (烤酥油), TTET Union’s (大統益) Mei Shih Chia Frying Oil (美食家油炸專用油), Dachan Great Wall Group’s (大成長城企業) Pure Frying Oil (純炸油), Fwusow Industry’s (福壽實業) Fwusow Frying Oil (福壽特級耐炸油), and Formosa Oilseed Processing’s (福懋油脂) Prime Cooking Oil (頂級烹調油) and Han Shih Healthy Frying Oil (漢氏益康耐炸油).
Liu said all the products were marketed as being free of trans fats, but the unhealthy type of fat was found in all seven of them at levels ranging from 0.3g to 1.77g per 100g.
Regulations stipulate that only cooking oil products that contain less than 0.3g of trans fat, which is produced during the process of hydrogenation, per 100g are permitted to be marketed as being trans fat-free, Liu said.
Hsinchu Public Health Bureau Director Ho Ping-sheng (何秉聖) said more alarming was that all of the products were found to contain chromium, a carcinogenic heavy metal, at levels between 0.03 parts per million (ppm) and 0.04ppm.
Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) said the government forwarded the test results to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and ordered all city public schools to stop using the potentially problematic products on Monday night.
However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) later held an impromptu press conference to dismiss Hsinchu’s findings.
“No developed country in the world, not even the US, New Zealand, Australia or Taiwan, has set up maximum permissible levels for chromium. According to the US Department of Health’s 2012 study on background levels of chromium in various kinds of foods, the average total chromium in them ranges from 0.02ppm to 0.52ppm,” Food Safety Division Deputy Director Hsueh Fu-chin (薛復琴) said.
Given that chromium is commonly found in two forms: trivalent chromium (chromium III), which is recognized as an essential nutrient, and hexavalent chromium (chromium VI), a human carcinogen, Hsinchu’s government should determine which of the two types of chromium it detected in the oil products before deciding on appropriate measures to be taken, she said.
The US FDA recommends a daily maximum intake of 0.18mg of chromium VI for a 60kg adult, but an individual would only ingest 0.00008mg of chromium VI in the consumption of 20g of cooking oil containing 0.04ppm of the carcinogen per day, Hsueh said.
“The level of chromium detected in the oil products is considered fairly normal,” she added.
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