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A National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment was established by the Ministry of Health and several central departments in Beijing on Thursday in the latest move to ensure food safety.

Meanwhile, the country's health and food safety watchdogs are continuing to seek an effective way to distinguish "gutter oil" from normal cooking oil, as none of the methods tried so far have proved satisfactory.

Illegally recycled cooking oil, or gutter oil as it is popularly known, is usually scooped up from the gutters and sewers behind cooking establishments, then clarified and resold to restaurants, but it can also be oil refined from low-quality pork, animal by-products, and oil overused for fried food in a broader sense.

"The five detection methods proposed so far don't work in identifying the illegal oil and authorities are still organizing experts to carry out research," Deng Haihua, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, said on Wednesday.

The ministry announced on Sept 18 that it was initiating a project with six central departments to develop better testing methods for gutter oil, and an expert panel was established to examine and verify the proposed methods.

Chen Junshi, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a food safety expert, said the five alternatives were selected from all the potential detection methods gathered nationwide, but all were deemed ineffective.

"The panel made experiments with the proposed methods to differentiate gutter oil samples from ordinary edible oil, but none proved effective," Chen said.

The methods included detecting the four core indicators of gutter oil as defined by the Beijing Food Safety Monitoring Center - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), cholesterol, conductivity and specific genes.

PAH, a carcinogen, has been confirmed as the greatest hazardous component in the illegal oil.

Although it has not been determined how carcinogenic the oil is, nutritionists have warned such oil can damage the gastrointestinal tract if consumed occasionally, and trigger cancers after long-term consumption.

"Animal and vegetable fat in refined waste oil will undergo rancidity, oxidation and decomposition after contamination, and produce toxic substances, such as arsenic. It will cause indigestion, insomnia, liver discomfort and other symptoms," said Zeng Jing, a nutrition expert at Guangdong Armed Police Hospital.

Experts said the failure to find a detection method once again shows that the safety of edible oil requires process monitoring.

（中國日報網英語點津 Helen 編輯）

About the broadcaster:

Nelly Min is an editor at China Daily with more than 10 years of experience as a newspaper editor and photographer. She has worked at major newspapers in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press. She is also fluent in Korean.