Dietary exposure to aluminium in the popular Chinese fried bread youtiao

ABSTRACT

Youtiao is a typical, traditional and widely consumed fried food in China. Fermentation of youtiao involves the use of aluminium potassium sulphate (alum). There are health concerns related to the levels of aluminium in food; therefore, we aimed to determine the aluminium concentrations of youtiao from various locations, and to estimate the dietary exposure by different age groups in southern and northern China. The aluminium content of youtiao samples varied considerably (range = 4.46–852.69 mg kg⁻¹). Both the mean and median aluminium contents of youtiao exceeded 100 mg kg⁻¹, which is the China National Standard (GB) 2760-2014 National Food Safety for Standards for food additives. However, the median and 97.5th percentile of weekly dietary exposure to aluminium from youtiao, estimated using Monte Carlo simulation, did not exceed the provisional tolerable weekly intake (PTWI) set by the joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) for children, adolescents, adults and seniors. The weekly dietary exposure to aluminium would exceed the PTWI if children, adolescents, adults and seniors consumed 134.47, 260.98, 327.10 or 320.41 g of youtiao per week, respectively.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Youtiao
• aluminium
• dietary exposure
• Monte Carlo simulation
• PTWI

Acknowledgement

Ge Li and Xue Zhao contributed equally to this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 31471668 and 31171704], the SJTU Agri-X Funding [grant number Agri-X2015007], and the Risk Assessment Laboratory (Hangzhou) [grant number 2015FXPG03].