Application of Risk Assessment in Nutrition.
Food safety related risk assessment provides a systematic framework to evaluate the probability of
occurrence of adverse health outcomes due to an excess exposure to a hazardous agent or
agents from food consumption. However, risk assessment applications in nutrition is beyond the areas that have originally been considered as the public health risk assessment realm.
Although, not advanced as microbial and chemical risk assessment in international and/or national/regional levels, nutritional risk assessment has never ceased and becomes more
and more critical to public health protection. The increasing use of functional foods, fortified foods, dietary supplements, formulated foods in recent years has increased the intake of nutrient substances among populations around the world. This results in a growing interest in determining the dietary standard of nutrients to prevent chronic adverse disease outcomes due to their excess intake.
The major application of nutritional risk assessment is to inform the guidance about diet and supplement intake, such as setting up ULs to avoid the excess intake of nutrients and therefore prevent chronic diseases due to the toxic effect of over-exposed nutrients. In the United States, the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine is the major group working in this field to establish the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI). In addition, a very important unique aspect that distinguishes nutrient and other non-nutrient hazards is that both high and low nutrient intakes.
The current approaches of nutritional risk assessment has their limitations. Since developed from traditional chemical risk assessment, most existing nutritional risk assessments address the effect of a single or relative specific nutrient substances, which leaves out the possibility to deal with very complex questions.
Adv Food Technol Nutr Sci Open J. 2015; 1(5): e14-e15. doi: 10.17140/AFTNSOJ1-e005
