How much American beef do you need to eat to cause heart palpitations? FDA: 1/10 of body weight

In response to the second meeting of the inter-departmental working group on US beef a few days ago, some scholars proposed that eating 500 kilograms of meat containing 10 ppb of ractopamine at a time would cause palpitations. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the Department of Health made a special clarification statement this afternoon. According to the human trial evaluation report proposed by the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) established by the International Food Standards Commission (Codex), the daily safe intake exceeds the acceptable amount and is about 1/10 of a person's body weight.

The Food Hygiene Administration clarified that consuming more than one-tenth of one's body weight of meat containing ractopamine in one serving may cause side effects.

The Food and Drug Administration said that the experimental condition of requiring subjects to consume 500 kilograms of meat at a time is impossible to occur in reality, but after dividing the no observed effect level (NOEL) observed in its experiment by the safety factor of 50, it shows that side effects may only occur if a 50-kilogram adult consumes 5 kilograms of meat per day.

The Food and Drug Administration stated that the Department of Health conducted its risk assessment for consuming meat containing ractopamine in accordance with international risk assessment principles. According to the results of JECFA's human trials, the no-observable-effect-dose value observed in the experiment was 5 mg, which was divided by the average body weight of the subjects, 75 kg, and the NOEL value was 67 μg/kg (micrograms per kilogram). However, considering the small number of people in this trial and the sensitive population, JECFA divided it by a safety factor of 50 and assessed the acceptable daily intake (Acceptable Daily Intake, ADI) to be 0-1 μg/kg bw/day. This data is close to the ADI values ​​calculated by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and other countries. According to the estimated results of the ADI value, an adult weighing 75 kg needs to consume 7.5 kg of meat containing 10 micrograms of clerctopamine every day; an adult weighing 50 kg needs to consume 5 kg of meat every day to exceed the acceptable safe intake.

In addition, in order to let the public understand ractopamine, the Food and Hygiene Administration has set up an online area to provide information and a consumer protection hotline to respond to public concerns.