Detection of DEHP in beverages sold in Canada using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
Bibliographic record
Abstract

 Phthalates are a class of plasticizing chemicals used to improve the flexibility of soft plastics (1, 6, 12, 15). As such, they have drawn increased attention as food contact substances (1, 10, 14), mostly entering food items from packaging materials (1, 8, 10, 14). Even though they had been approved as indirect food additives in Europe and the U.S. (1), the discovery of high concentrations of di(2-ethyl-hexyl) phthalate (DEHP), also known as bis 2-ethylhexyl phthalate (BEHP) (12, 15), in a probiotic food product by a scientist from Taiwan in April 2011 initiated the world’s greatest health safety efforts (7). Investigators found that DEHP, along with other phthalates, were deliberately added to food products in replacement of the approved food additives, which would normally be added to emulsify the components in the drinks to achieve a natural and appealing appearance (7, 12, 15). This contamination event has been known as the 2011 Taiwan Food Scandal, where processed food items such as sports drinks, concentrated juice beverages, tea drinks, jam or jelly and food supplements were adulterated with phthalates, a harmful class of chemical compounds. Consequently, ingestion of these harmful compounds may result in adverse health affects such as endocrine disruption, malformation of reproductive organs, infertility and abnormal neurodevelopment (12). Many products made it across the border to 22 different countries (15, 17) including Canada and U.S. (17). Since then, the Taiwanese government made improvements to the food industry regulations (15, 17). This study was aimed to determine if DEHP was present, and compared to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) DEHP tolerable daily intake (TDI) of 0.05 mg/kg body weight (bw)/day (12, 17), in 30 different drinks of imported and domestic brands sold in Canada. For comparison purposes, the author completed calculations based on the average adult (over 18 years old) body weight of 70 kg, according to EFSA (41). Using liquid/liquid extraction followed by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), 30 beverages were tested and analyzed for the presence of DEHP. Low concentrations of DEHP was detected in 3 of the beverages and none in the other 27 beverages tested on a calibrated instrument. The concentrations detected for the 3 beverages were lower than the TDI for a 70 kg body weight. Control samples were used to ensure method validity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".