A random testing of food products popular among children conducted by Taipei’s Department of Health found that none of the products contained excessive levels of additives.
The department last month tested 45 products purchased from stores near elementary schools and tourist-oriented “old streets.” They covered 15 assorted candies, 10 dried seafood snacks, five kinds of preserved fruit, five bakery products, five carbonated beverages and five juice drinks.
Some of the products were produced domestically, while others were imported from countries including Japan, India and Thailand.
“The products were tested for preservatives, coloring agents and sweeteners, and all the results conformed to the Standards for Specification, Scope, Application and Limitation of Food Additives (食品添加物使用範圍及限量暨規格標準),” Wang Ming-li (王明理), director of the department’s Food and Drug Division, told a news conference in Taipei.
However, five of the 36 packaged snacks did not conform with package labeling requirements, Wang said, adding that four of the products were locally manufactured and one was imported from Thailand.
Four of the products did not include the type of coloring agents used, Wang said. They were a package of braised, dried and sliced fish (紅燒魚片) from supermarket chain Simple Mart (美廉社), chocolate beans purchased in the city’s Datong District (大同), a dried mango product from Thailand and candied kumquat sold at a store in Xinyi District (信義).
One Changhua County-made dried fish snack was also found lacking, because it did not include the name and contact information of its manufacturer, nor its place of origin, Wang said.
Moreover, the label stated only that the product was “fresh for 365 days,” but did not give an expiration date.
Manufacturers of the deficient products face fines ranging from NT$30,000 to NT$3 million (US$956 to US$95,602), and are prohibited from selling the items until improvements are made, Wang added.
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