4. Contribution to consumer exposure assessment

Chronic consumer exposure assesses the quantity of substances ingested by a consumer over a long period (e.g. a year), representative of the consumer's life and/or practices. For a given country or geographical area, it provides a snapshot based on products on the market, eating habits, the population under consideration, and industrial practices: type of packaging, formulation of packaging material, food preservation method, portion size, etc.

Using the principles formulated by the 16th-century physician and alchemist Paracelsus, exposure can be directly compared with the dose required for a toxicological effect to be detectable, and thus analyze the danger associated with adventitious or ubiquitous contamination of foodstuffs. In the case of a health monitoring campaign, exposure is compared with the tolerable daily intake or an acceptable daily intake. As there...