Food safety: measuring exposure

A European funded project currently underway will seek to facilitate the assessment of exposure to a range of food chemicals - to include food additives, pesticides and nutrients, in a bid to meet the growing need for food safety guarantees. The new technology is intended for use by regulatory authorities, industries, nutritionists and researchers.

Led by Prof. Dr Michael Gibney at the Institute of European Food Studies in Dublin, Ireland, the principal remit of the project is to provide insights into all aspects related to the safety of the food supply; including exposure to, for example, pesticide residues, micronutrients and mycotoxins.

The project, called 'MonteCarlo', will use powerful mathematical modelling techniques to analyse and assess exposure so that risk (or potential benefit in the case of assessing nutrient intakes) to health may be evaluated more accurately.

At a basic level, the procedure for estimating exposure to a food chemical (for example, an additive) is to multiply food intake by the concentration of the chemical in food. If foods containing the chemical of interest are under-reported, then the exposure of the chemical from those foods, and therefore the risk, may be underestimated.

The first objective for the project is to conduct a multi-centre study, using existing national data, to explore the influence of input distributions on model output for the key components of a stochastic model of food chemical intake. These components are food intake, chemical occurrence, chemical concentration, market share, brand loyalty, and correlated foods.

The second objective is to generate databases of true intakes of: food additives, based on brand-level food consumption and ingredient composition, pesticide residues, based on duplicate diets, and nutrients, based on biomarker studies.

The final objective is to use the 'true' databases to validate the probabilistic models and the associated computer code.

Further information about the other objectives and expected outcomes of project QLK1-1999-00155 (MONTECARLO) can be obtained on the website​.