Chefs in a stir over seaweed ban

Sue Bennett -

Chefs in Japanese restaurants and home cooks are having to adapt recipes as stocks of the dried seaweed kombu dwindle across the country. Kombu is used to make dashi stock for many dishes.

Quarantine inspectors began checking brown seaweed (phaeophyceae) for iodine levels last October after at least one woman and her breastfeeding baby became sick. Since then, many phaeophyceae seaweed consignments have been refused entry to the country.

A Food Standards Authority spokeswoman said the woman was eating three serves of seaweed daily and the baby developed severe thyroid dysfunction.

Iodine is an essential nutrient in the diet but for about 5 per cent of the population with an underlying thyroid disease, excessive intake can be dangerous. ''If this group is exposed to a large amount of iodine, such as you get in kombu, it's likely to precipitate overactivity and can be life-threatening,'' said an endocrinologist, Professor Creswell Eastman.

Food Standards became alerted to the ''issue of excessive iodine'' after an outbreak of illness from drinking Bonsoy soy milk in 2009. A class action against the company resulted.

Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia after the incident, a co-author of a paper detailing the cases of eight soy milk sufferers, the endocrinologist Dr Bronwyn Crawford, wrote: ''There is a strong public health argument for monitoring iodine levels in imported foods …''

She said excessive iodine in Bonsoy was traced to a type of seaweed used in its manufacture.

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