Are Toxic Chemicals in Infant Foods Putting Babies at Risk? A New Approach to Assess and Rank Contaminants

Chemical hazards in food, particularly naturally occurring contaminants like mycotoxins, pose a significant threat to public health. These contaminants can cause acute or chronic health effects in both humans and animals, leading to serious concerns. Additionally, they result in substantial economic losses. To address this issue, it is crucial to develop a practical framework for assessing and ranking hazardous chemical contaminants, aiding regulatory agencies in evidence-based risk assessment and resource allocation for risk management.

Existing risk ranking frameworks can be broadly categorized into qualitative, semi-quantitative, and quantitative methods. Various approaches, such as risk ratio methods, scoring methods, decision trees, and expert judgment, have been proposed based on data availability. Regulatory agencies have also developed specific risk ranking tools for different food-hazard pairs or chemical pollutants.

Quantitative methods are preferred for risk assessment due to their ability to provide clear and concise characterization of health risks. However, applying quantitative risk prioritization and ranking in practice comes with challenges. These include difficulties in evaluating chemical toxicity, distinguishing similar chemicals with limited toxicological data, and inconsistent results due to varying methods used in dose-response modeling and risk characterization. Some quantitative methods employ weight categories to overcome data limitations, but they rely heavily on assumptions and may compromise comparison accuracy. Other approaches, such as quality/disability adjusted life year (QALY/DALY)-based methods, standardize risk ranking but have limited applicability due to their complexity and data requirements.

To address these challenges and enhance the utility of risk ranking, a feasible quantitative approach should possess certain desired features. These include the ability to use multicriteria to identify chemicals with negligible or low health concerns, effectively pinpoint chemicals of greater concern for detailed analysis, and quantitatively characterize health risks for ranking purposes.

Grains and grain-based products are vital components of infant diets, directly impacting their health. Unfortunately, these foods have been found to contain various toxic chemicals, particularly mycotoxins, posing significant health risks to infants.

As part of the SAFFI (Safe Food For Infants) EU Project, a study aims to develop a tiered approach to identify and rank chemical food contaminants of high health concern. The approach will be applied to assess the risk of mycotoxins in infant foods sold in China, demonstrating its usefulness, advantages, and potential limitations. The study proposes an exposure-based screening approach to identify mycotoxins with lower health risk and a probabilistic margin of exposure (MOE)-based risk ranking method. This method quantifies the health risk of top-ranked mycotoxins compared to the risk posed by common trace elements in infant foods. The MOE components, including the reference dose indicating toxicity and the exposure level through food intake, are estimated probabilistically using advanced statistical methods.

This tiered approach offers practical adaptability for complex risk assessments of food contaminants. It not only provides a probabilistic framework for ranking chemical exposure risks but also offers crucial insights into the quality of infant foods in the Chinese market. Regulatory agencies can utilize this information to allocate resources effectively and mitigate risks associated with infant food consumption.