Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and many Taiwanese will be setting up a barbecue, the traditional repast for this celebration. But a Consumers' Foundation report has revealed that many brands of barbecue sauce have excessive sodium levels.
According to the foundation, the worst offender is the Lee Kum Kee brand, with 4,520mg of sodium per 100g of its Sweet Barbecue Sauce.
PHOTO: CHU PEI-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Its Korean-style and Japanese-style barbecue sauces were also found to have high levels of sodium, with 3,340mg and 3,140mg per 100g respectively.
Of the 13 brands tested, only Kraft and HP had nutritional information in English. Lee Kum Kee's Sweet Barbecue Sauce had 3.7 times the sodium content of the Kraft product, which had the lowest sodium content of the 13 products tested.
The Department of Health's recommended daily sodium intake is 2,400mg.
It suggested that, based on its research, thick coatings of commercial barbecue sauces could put consumers at risk.
If a family of four uses one bottle of Lee Kum Kee Barbecue Sauce on its grilled meat, each person would have an intake of 2,712mg of sodium from the sauce alone, somewhat more than the recommended daily intake.
A spokesperson for Lee Kum Kee said the company changed its recipe for the sauce last year and that products coming onto the market had half the sodium of older products.
As the sauce has a shelf life of three years, the older product is still widely available.
The company said it would also be changing the recipe of its Korean-style and Japanese-style sauces to reduce levels of sodium.
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