What is hexane, this hydrocarbon current in meals {that a} deputy desires to ban? | EUROtoday

On Apr 7, 2025

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“QUi imagine, by making a vinaigrette, that it contains a hydrocarbon? »Asks Richard Ramos to our colleagues from Parisian. Indeed, MP MoDem has tabled a bill aimed at prohibiting the use of hexane in food production. A parliamentary commission of inquiry on the subject is open in parallel.

Traces of this petroleum by-product seem in margarine, cocoa butter, soy protein merchandise, childish milk, cereal meals for younger kids, or the cake used to feed livestock. Problem: it’s by no means formally talked about within the composition of meals, since it’s used as “technological auxiliary”, that’s to say that it helps their manufacturing, permitting to extract vegetable oil from crushed seeds of rapeseed, sunflower or soy, after which bettering the extraction of the oil remaining within the seeds after their first stress.

The object of this invoice is due to this fact to “make the insertion of a health warning compulsory and to suspend for the most risky populations, then to gradually prohibit, in the name of the precautionary principle, Hexane in foodstuffs and animal food”. It was recorded final March by the presidency of the National Assembly.

“The hydrocarbon most used by the Oiliers”

This liquid certainly arouses many issues amongst specialists. Hexane, or “C6H14” based on its chemical formulation, is “considered the most harmful of saturated hydrocarbons in C, according to the National Institute for Research and Security (INRS)”, factors out Richard Ramos. “What a lack of transparency, it is incomprehensible for consumers that there is no information,” nonetheless annoys the elected official of the Loiret with our colleagues.

In concept, we might take in solely a tiny amount of this compound, because of the thresholds imposed by the European Union (one milligram per kilo in oil), supposed to ensure consumption free from any hazard.

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Answer

Except that these thresholds, established in 1996, are thought-about inadequate by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) which alerted, in a observe revealed in September 2024, on the necessity to reassess the product and its authorizations. In query, the use by producers of a “technical hexane”, which versus pure hexane, used within the laboratory, might include different harmful merchandise. Very younger kids “could have higher exposure levels than expected,” worries EFSA lastly.

But this hydrocarbon “remains by far the most used by the cups, all over the world,” explains the National Federation of Gras Industries (FNCG). Even if using Hexane is already prohibited in natural manufacturing, creating “a two -speed diet”, based on Richard Ramos, it due to this fact seems to be delicate to generalize this prohibition on the entire of meals manufacturing.

https://www.lepoint.fr/sante/qu-est-ce-que-l-hexane-cet-hydrocarbure-present-dans-la-nourriture-qu-un-depute-veut-faire-interdire-07-04-2025-2586707_40.php