Assessment of nitrite contamination in baby foods, marketed in Turkey (original) (raw)

metal contaminations should seriously be taken into concern. It is essential to take special care throughout the entire process of manufacturing foods for infants and young children, as the fragility of them requires an increased safety. We suggest that contaminations with metals, especially aluminum should be routinely monitored in foods for babies in order to reduce food-borne hazards in infants and young children. In 2000, EU approval was given for the addition of phytosterols to yellow fat spreads based on a comprehensive toxicology dataset. Results from a post-launch monitoring (PLM) programme showed that phytosterol intakes were lower than originally predicted. Based on these findings a second Novel Foods application was made to extend the approval to include other product types such as milk and yoghurt. A novel approach was required to produce a risk assessment demonstrating that these additional sources of phytosterols in the diet would not lead to safe levels being exceeded. Food consumption data for the three different product types (spreads, milk and yoghurt) were obtained from National dietary surveys where these were available in countries such as the UK and the Netherlands. Individual dietary records were then used to model the intake of phytosterols from the three different products. It was assumed that all milk, yogurt and spread consumed was replaced with phytosterolcontaining products, taking into account not only the total amount of the product type consumed but also which of the products types are eaten in combination For the majority of EU countries detailed dietary survey data were not publicly available. However, it was possible to obtain consumer purchase data for these product types for some countries which could also used to calculate the intake of the different food products. As before, a worst case scenario was used to estimate phytosterol intake by assuming that all milk, yogurt and spread consumed was replaced with phytosterol-containing products. The accuracy of this data was assessed by comparing the individual intakes estimated from the National dietary surveys in UK and Netherlands with values estimated from the consumer purchase data collected in these countries. Overall, the intake modelling demonstrated that phytosterols could be added to different product types without intakes exceeding safe levels identified in toxicology studies. Novel Foods approval was granted for the use of phytosterols in milk and yoghurt type products. A sensitive and specific in house method using onestep clean up procedure based on gel permeation chromatography was developed. The method is suitable for determination of benzo(a)pyrene in edible oil. The main improvements compared with previous conventionale procedures are that analyte peak does not overlap with matrix peaks and that the one-step procedure of purification is rapid and simple with clearly improved analytical performance. The quantitative analysis was performed by highperformance liquid chromatograph with fluorescence detector and confirmation was based on the GC-MS. The mean recovery rate of benzo(a)pyrene studied at three concentration levels (n = 9) was 101% (R.S.D. 2.06%). No matrix effect was detected for different oils (olive, sunflower and rape oil). The limit of detection of benzo(a)pyrene by fluorescence was 0.1 g/kg (R.S.D. 5.54%) and the limit of quantification was 0.2 g/kg (R.S.D. 2.19%).