Ethyl carbamate in retail market condiments and risk assessment of its dietary exposure for the Korean population

ABSTRACT

Ethyl carbamate (EC), a potential human dietary carcinogen, is found in fermented foods including the fermented soybean-based condiments, the major part of the Korean diet. Therefore, it is expected that their EC contents might pose health risks. Herein, we collected 111 condiments and estimated their EC contents via gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Further, dietary intake of EC was evaluated, and the risk levels were assessed via the margin of exposure (MOE) approach and excess cancer risk assessment. EC contents of the condiments ranged from not detectable to 39.47 μg/kg, and the daily EC exposure ranged from 1.4 to 2.0 ng/kg BW per day, depending on gender and age groups in Korea. Of the condiments, soy sauce was the largest contributor to EC exposure. MOE and excess cancer risks for the average consumer were 166,300 and 9.0 × 10⁻⁸, respectively, and those for the consumers in the 95^th percentiles (P95) were 53,504 and 2.8 × 10⁻⁷, respectively, indicating that the risk of exposure to EC is of lower concern in average consumers than heavy consumers. However, the EC exposure from condiments was higher than that in other Asian countries.

Abbreviations: EC: ethyl carbamate; GC-MS: gas chromatography-mass spectrometry; MOE: margin of exposure; MRL: maximum residue level; IDL: instrumental detection level; IQL: instrumental quantification level; MDL: method detection level; MQL: method quantification level; EDI: estimated daily intakes; BMDL₁₀: benchmark dose lower confidence limit

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Condiments
• ethyl carbamate
• Korean market
• MOE
• risk assessment

Authors’ contributions

Seungmin Kim: Investigation, data curation, writing – original draft. Sunghyeon Jung: Investigation, data curation. Inhwan Kim: Methodology, data curation, writing – review & editing. MyungSub Chung: Writing – review & editing. Sangah Shin: Data curation, writing – review & editing. Jihyun Lee: Conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, writing – review & editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean government [MSIP, grant numbers NRF-2019R1F1A1062634].