Possible use of food consumption surveys to estimate exposure to additives

Several methods can be and are being used to assess individual food consumption. Four types, namely 24-h recall, dietary records, food frequency and dietary history are discussed. For assessing the exposure to additives it is concluded that the dietary history method is probably the best choice since this method is oriented towards a quantification of habitual food consumption. Dietary records and 24-h recall can be used as long as their short-term nature is accounted for. High intake levels obtained by those methods are in a way a worst-case analysis, especially when the calculations are based on users only. Since children have, on average, a higher consumption per kg of body weight and acceptable daily intakes (ADIs) are based on body weight, this group must be of special importance in risk assessment regarding additives. However, a relatively high intake among (young) children is an age effect and ADIs refer to lifetime exposure. Both food consumption and additive use in food products are changing over time, so that existing databases are prone to becoming outdated relatively fast. At the end of this paper an overview is given of existing databanks in the EU in relation to the estimation of exposure to additives.