Approaches to Dietary Exposure for Chemicals in Food: Data Needs and Modelling Techniques

Exposure assessment is a key element of chemical food safety. A plethora of chemicals exist in food as additives, flavourings, food contact materials, pesticides, contaminants, and micronutrients, amongst others. In order to ensure the safety of a chemical present in food, an estimate of the likely exposure to the chemical in consumer populations is needed. This, in turn, can be compared with an appropriate Health-Based Guidance Value (HBGV) or reference dose to assess risk.

A number of techniques exist for estimating consumer dietary exposure to food chemicals; all, generally, centered around estimates of food intake and the level of chemical occurring in food. Techniques range from screening methods based on simple worst-case estimates of exposure to more refined probabilistic models aimed at providing realistic estimates of exposure for consumer populations. For certain chemical groups, like pesticides, methodologies have, also, been developed for cumulative or mixture exposure assessment. This presentation will provide a broad overview of different approaches to food chemical exposure assessment, as well as their data needs, uses, and future directions in the area.