This article is taken from a talk I gave at
the IFSTI annual meeting in Kilkenny
recently. The PowerPoint presentation from
that talk can be downloaded from CRN (click
here). In that talk, I asked the
question: What more can we do to really
understand the exposure levels to food
chemicals for different demographic groups
of the population?
To answer this question, I discussed the
following points:
- The available food consumption databases
- The use of the databases in assessing
chemical intakes
- Handling variability and uncertainty.
- The role that CREMe Food Safety can play in
enabling you to get the results you need
Food consumption Databases
There are a range of food consumption
databases available including the US NHANES
food consumption database, the UK NDNS
database, the Chinese food
consumption database and the Irish (IUNA)
food consumption databases. There are
references and links to these data sets
available in CRN (click
here).
These food consumption databases contain a
detailed set of demographic information as well
as detailed food consumption information for
the population. Data sets typically include
hundreds or
thousands of subjects and a large number of
eating events for each subject, including
- Habitual Food and Beverage consumption of
each subject
- Height, weight, body fat content of each
subject
- Habitual physical activity levels
- Lifestyle characteristics including
smoking
- Attitudes to food and health
- Socio-demographic characteristics
The data table describing the subjects
contains one record per subject recording
age, height, weight, gender, and other
demographic information.
The diary table contains every single eating
event recorded for each subject. For each
eating event,
the subject code, the food code, the amount
of food consumed (in grams), day, time
and meal number is recorded. Further
information such as brand code and packaging
type can also be recorded.
See slides 8 and 9 of the PowerPoint
file for screen shots of sample subject
and diary tables.
Food group tables can be used to group food
codes of similar chemical characteristics in
order to allow chemical concentrations to be
linked to groups of foods.
From chemical concentrations to population
exposure levels
There is a large amount of data available
about chemical or contaminant levels in
foods. These come from specific studies in
literature, industry information and routine
government monitoring programmes.
A chemical concentration table is used to
store information about chemicals. For each
chemical the presence probability and
concentration of the chemical in each food or
food group is stored.
See slides 16 and 17 of the PowerPoint
file for screen shots of sample food
group and chemical concentration tables.
Once these data sets are set up, you are
now ready to run a probabilistic exposure
assessment.
