[An improved method for estimating daily intake of environmental contaminants using Monte-Carlo simulation]

We previously developed a new method for estimating intakes of environmental contaminants, called Estimated Ecological Daily Intake (EEDI), which is based on food consumption data. This method accurately estimates the intakes of food additives and contaminants and provides rough estimates of averages and distribution curves for the target population. By this method, we originally considered only food consumption, but did take into account the contamination level of each food article. Therefore, we attempted to improve EEDI by incorporating contamination levels of foodstuffs. Practically, we developed an improved Estimated Ecological Daily Intake estimation method for the daily intake of food contaminants and additives, and estimated daily intake of environmental contaminants based on food consumption data of 159 female volunteers, assuming that the contamination level follows Poisson distribution. The results obtained are as follows: 1) Estimated intakes were found to be accurate enough to obtain important values of distribution, such as mean, maximum value, mode, and median, which could be used to determine a standard. 2) Comparing the distribution of the estimated intakes, with that of intakes estimated by the fixed contamination level, the class-containing mode became lower and the class-containing the maximum value became higher. 3) This method was shown to provide information on the risk or probability of exceeding tolerable intake due to excessive food consumption or eating highly contaminated foods.