[Survey on environmental contamination in the total diet of an Italian population]

This work is a review of the total diet studies carried out in the nineties in the area of Pavia in order to evaluate food exposure to some xenobiotics: heavy metals (cadmium, mercury, lead, nickel), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides and mycotoxins. The review shows that: total diet studies are the best tool to evaluate food exposure to xenobiotics; however, the studies utility depends both on the presence of an actual correlation between xenobiotic food exposure and xenobiotic concentration in human body and depends also on environmental distribution of the xenobiotic. It's the case of the mycotoxins which, characterised by a punctiform contamination, can be studied only with analytical studies on biological samples, e.g. human milk. The results point out that some groups of the population are at risk because of high xenobiotic food ingestions above the acceptable daily intakes. In conclusion, we suggest that total diet studies should be carried out in a more systematic way in order to obtain effective surveillance and preventive programmes, besides we underline that the definition of reference values may be of great utility.