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THE UPTAKE OF WATER DISINFECTION BY-PRODUCTS INTO FOODS DURING HOME PROCESSING
Citation:
Raymer, J. H., E. D. Pellizzari, G G. Akland, H. Weinberg, AND J A. Shoemaker. THE UPTAKE OF WATER DISINFECTION BY-PRODUCTS INTO FOODS DURING HOME PROCESSING. Presented at ISEA Annual Meeting, Monterey, CA, October 24-27, 2000.
Description:
A variety of organic compounds in tap water are produced as a result of disinfection process. Use of chlorine-containing chemicals for disinfection produces many disinfection by-products (DBPs) including trihalomethanes, haloacetonitriles and haloacetic acid. Ozonation with secondary disinfectants such as hypochlorite yields many of same compounds although at lower concentrations, and a variety of aldehydes, ketones and bromate (if the source water contains bromide). Human ingestion exposures to DBPs occur not only as a result of drinking disinfected water, but also by using tap water to prepare foods/beverages in the home. Work underway at RTI is designed to improve our understanding of contamination of foods as a result of cooking food in water containing DBPs. We evaluated the stability of haloacetic acids (HAAs) and haloacetonitriles in water during boiling and measured the uptake of HAAs into foods cooked by different methods. Foods tested: spaghetti, pinto beans, instant oatmeal, chicken, carrots and green beans. Reagent water was spiked with bromochloroacetic, bromodichloroacetic, chlorodibromoacetic, dibromoacetic, dichloroacetic, monobromoacetic, monochloroacetic and tribromoacetic, and trichloroaceti acids. After 60 min of boiling only chloroacetic acid and dichloroacetic acid were well-recovered. The cooking experiments showed a total of 2-9.6% of the HAAs from cooking water were absorbed into pasta (unrinsed) and significant amounts of chloroacetic, bromoacetic, dichloroacetic, bromochloroacetic and dibromoacetic acids were lost upon rinsing with reagent water. However, when rinsing water contained HAAs a net increase in HAA concentrations in pasta was measured. The concentrations of HAAs not stable to cooking also increased following rinsing.