The German Approach to Estimating Dietary Exposures Using Food Monitoring Data

Abstract

Up to now in Germany there does not exist a total diet study (TDS) that will allow the assessment of exposure due to chemicals on a national level. Fortunately, this data gap can be partly closed by the extensive national food monitoring. Thus, national exposure assessments as done by the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) mainly rely on matched data from the food monitoring and food surveys. The German approach using data from food monitoring will be demonstrated using the example of dietary cadmium intake. It can be seen that for cadmium both German approach and TDS can be applied to determine background exposure. Even if the German food monitoring approach does not cover processed contaminants, one advantage is the larger sample size also for rare consumed foods. Furthermore, it enables to support risk managers by providing information on contribution of single food categories on the level of disaggregation that is compatible to several legislations. Considering the diversity of purposes of risk assessments and relevant contaminants as well as being aware of the advantages of both concepts it can be concluded that both approaches should ideally complement each other.