Page 2 The Myth of Safe Fruit and Vegetables
People eat in different ways
Over the past decades, people in Europe have developed very different consumption patterns, whichtoday - where almost all foodstuff is contaminated with pesticides - leads to different levels of expo-sure. We have analysed the consequences illustrated by apple consumption.
Small kids, big appetite and large apples
When talking about pesticide exposure through food one needs to look at three figures:1. the amount of food eaten,2. the pesticide load in certain food, and3. the individual unit size in case of large portions, such as for pearsand apples.While it is rather easy to determine pesticide residues in individual foodstuffs, it is rather complicatedto get figures about the representative consumption of a population in all its diversity.Gender, age, culture, religious education, income, etc influence what type of food is consumed andthen, in addition to that, there are vegetarians, vegans, macrobiotic diets, etc.In three European countries so-called dietary studies have recently been published: for Germany, theNetherlands and the United Kingdom. They all differ a lot: the German study only focuses on childrenaged 2-5 years and neglects minorities, the British study considers various differences in age andliving conditions, and also looks at consumption patterns of vegetarians.It is easy to see that even in these fairly Northern European countriesconsumption patterns differ considerably. British children, for exam-ple, like apples the most: a 1.5 to 4 year old British kid with an aver-age body weight of 14.5 kg eats up to 373 gram apples on somedays, while a Dutch child aged 1 to 6 years with an average bodyweight of 17.1 kg only eats 260 gram a day. Then on top of this, thereare big apples and small apples – an average apple in the UK weighs112 g, while a German apple weighs 181 g.Why is this important?The British kid frequently eats about 3 apples a day, each 112 g, andone or two of these apples may contain much higher pesticide resi-dues than another. This has to be taken into account when estimat-ing exposure in the diet. The consequences of these regional differ-ences are clear: exposure varies regionally and so does the healthrisk.
Pesticide Action Network Germany
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EU Regulation 396/2005:
‘
Acute reference dose’ (ARfD) means the estimateof the amount of substancein food, expressed on abody weight basis, that canbe ingested over a short period of time, usually during one day, without appreciable risk to theconsumer on the basis of thedata produced by appropriate studies and taking into account sensitive groups within the population (e.g. childrenand the unborn).
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