Meeting the challenges in the development of risk-benefit assessment of foods

Abstract

A B S T R A C TBackground: Risk-benefit assessment (RBA) of foods aims to assess the combined negative and positive health effects associated with food intake. RBAs integrate chemical and microbiological risk assessment with risk and benefit assessment in nutrition. Scope and Approach: Based on the past experiences and the methodological differences between the underlying research disciplines, this paper aims to describe the recent progress in RBAs, identifying the key challenges that need to be addressed for further development, and making suggestions for meeting these challenges. Key Findings and Conclusions: Ten specific challenges are identified and discussed. They include the variety of different definitions and terminologies used in the underlying research disciplines, the differences between the "bottom-up" and the "top-down" approaches and the need for clear risk-benefit questions. The frequent lack of data and knowledge with their consequential uncertainties is considered, as well as the imbalance in the level of scientific evidence associated with health risks and benefits. The challenges that are consequential to the need of considering substitution issues are discussed, as are those related to the inclusion of microbiological hazards. Further challenges include the choice of the integrative health metrics and the potential scope of RBAs, which may go beyond the health effect. Finally, the need for more practical applications of RBA is stressed. Suggestions for meeting the identified challenges include an increased interdisciplinary consensus, reconsideration of methodological approaches and health metrics based on a categorisation of risk-benefit questions, and the performance of case studies to experience the feasibility of the proposed approaches.

A probabilistic approach for risk-benefit assessment of food substitutions: A case study on substituting meat by fish

“…The need for including variability in RBA has been previously stressed (Hart et al 2013;Nauta et al 2018). Variability was also taken into account in another RBA of increased fish consumption (Hoekstra et al 2013).…”

“…In neither of these RBAs individual variability in fish species or meat product preferences was taken into account, except the variability originating from the baseline scenarios. However, substitution behavior may differ between individuals (Nauta et al 2018). Upon implementation of dietary policies, some individuals will likely not reach the recommended consumption level while others will consume more (Fransen et al 2010;Nordic Council of Ministers 2006).…”

Risk‐Benefit Assessment of Foods

“…RBA integrates knowledge on nutrition, toxicology, microbiology, chemistry and human epidemiology for comprehensive health impact assessments (Pires et al, 2019). It constitutes one of the three pillars of the Risk-Benefit Analysis paradigm that combines RBA, risk-benefit management and risk-benefit communication, mirroring the risk analysis paradigm (EFSA Scientific Committee, 2010;Fransen et al, 2010;Nauta et al, 2018;Pires et al, 2019). Figure 1 illustrates the proposed procedure for a RBA which consists of two separate and independent arms of assessing the risk and the benefit, respectively.…”

RiskBenefit4EU – Partnering to strengthen Risk‐Benefit Assessment within the EU using a holistic approach

“…This stepwise approach consists of six steps. First, the problem definition (step 1/6) should state the scope of assessment and the research question to be answered, including the population of interest (general or a sub-group population), the level of aggregation (food component, food or diet) and the type of assessment (qualitative or quantitative) Nauta et al, 2018). The second step is the scenarios definition (step 2/6), which is a narrative description of hypothetical or real situations.…”

“…incidence of disease due to an exposure via dose-response models, usually applied for microbiological and chemical hazards, or ii) the top-down approach, that starts from the incidence of a certain disease due to an exposure, usually applied for nutrients and nutritional factors and also for chemical hazards (Nauta et al, 2018). After assessing all risks and benefits selected for the RBA scenario, the next step is the quantification of the health impacts in a common metric (step 5/6), which will enable the comparison.…”