So, uh, not to make you guys lose your dinner, but this headline just caught our eye: "Chinese consumed millions of gallons of toxic sewage oil". According to a report from He Dongping, a professor of food science engeineering at Wuhan Polytechnic University, approximately 10% of all cooking oil used in China is swill--oil that's been used, pulled out of the gutter, "purified" and reused. Numerically speaking, that's 2-3 million tons of the estimated 22.5 million tons of cooking oil that's used annually.

10%. That's one in 10 meals. Or once every three days.

The cheap stuff doesn't look much different than the real stuff, but there are two huge differences. For one, the swill is about half the price of the clean oil. And for two, the swill contains some pretty toxic stuff, including a scary-sounding toxic agent called 'aflatoxin'. Aflatoxin can cause liver disease, and it's a B1-level, Probable Human Carcinogen. However, according to soshiok.com, it's "100 times more poisonous than the forbidding white arsenic".

There's also currently no way for authorities to tell the difference between the two types of oil, and part of that is because, guess what, swill oil producers sometimes mix the two together.

If this all sounds horrible to you, well, it is. But it's not going away; it's amazingly profitable. Apparently an "oil fisher" can fish out enough oil every night to make four barrels, or about RMB300. That's RMB10,000 a month. Accordingly, Professor He estimates that "it might take about 10 years before China could get rid of the swill-oil completely." But even that sounds optimistic to us.

Not grossed out enough yet? Check out these pictures of the "refining process" from ChinaSMACK.