Objective
The EU funded BACCHUS project aims to develop tools and resources to study relationships between bioactive food compound intakes and cardiovascular health in humans. To handle variation and uncertainty of bioactive levels in foods a probabilistic model of bioactive intakes was used to estimate distributions of population intakes.
Methods
To assess food bioactive intake distributions in Europe, national food intake surveys were used from the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain. To account for variability and uncertainty of bioactive concentrations within foods, the foods consumed were linked to discrete bioactive concentration distributions using published data on plant based foods as captured in the eBasis database. Daily bioactive population intakes were calculated using a probabilistic intake model in the Creme Nutrition® software.
Results
Data shows apple (g/day) and catechin (mg/day) intakes from apples and apple products in the four countries.
| Daily intakes (mg/day) | Ireland | UK | Spain | Norway |
| Mean (95%ile) | Mean (95%ile) | Mean (95%ile) | Mean (95%ile) | |
| Apple + Apple Products | 33 (135) | 32 (129) | 42 (183) | 78 (300) |
| Catechin | 1±0.1 (5.8±0.4) | 1±0.1 (5.2±0.3) | 1.3±0.06 (8±0.4) | 2.5±0.14 (14.8±1.0) |
| Epicatechin | 13±0.6 (56.5±3.5) | 12.9±0.65 (54.5±3.6) | 16.7±0.48 (73.1±2.4) | 29.8±1.06 (119.6±6.0) |
| Epigallocatechin | 22.4±0.9 (92.2±4.1) | 21.7±1.0 (88.2±4.9) | 28.9±0.8 (125.2±6.8) | 53.1±1.8 (204.9±7.7) |
| Epicatechin-gallate | 0.1±0.0 (0.3±0.0) | 0.1±0.0 (0.2±0.0) | 0.1±0.0 (0.3±0.0) | 0.1±0.0 (0.6±0.0) |
Conclusion
This study enables the link between bioactive concentration levels in foods and representative population intakes, using probabilistic intake models to better estimate full intake distributions in a population.
