Investigation and Health Risk Assessment of Nitrate ion, Nitrite ion, and Phthalate Esters in Herbal Distillates Produced by Iranian Companies

Abstract

The concentrations of nitrate ion, nitrite ion, nitrosamines, and phthalate esters in the ten herbal distillates, including rose, caraway seed, cumin seed, fumitory, carum, fenugreek, chicory, salix aegyptian, and blessed, produced by four companies were determined. The results were evaluated for each species by statistical methods. For this purpose, the normality test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and post hoc test were applied to compare the obtained results of four companies. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to study the normality of the results. Also, the control chart was plotted to investigate and compare the quality of herbal distillates produced by these companies. The results indicated that the concentrations of nitrate ion and nitrite ion in all samples were in the ranges of 5.11-7.84 mg L^-1 and 0.10-0.97 mg L^-1, respectively. All herbal distillate samples produced by these companies were free of nitrosamines. The phthalate esters with low concentrations (0.14-0.47 μg L^-1) were presented in the herbal distillate samples produced in the second week after their production. The concentrations of nitrate ions and phthalate esters followed a normal distribution, while the nitrite ion concentrations didn’t. The concentrations of phthalate esters in the samples were also determined in the sixth, tenth and fourteenth weeks after producing the herbal distillate samples to investigate the time effect and rate of phthalate ester release in the samples. The concentrations of nitrate ions, nitrite ions, and phthalate esters were lower than their maximum permissible limits in drinking water declared by the World Health Organization (WHO).