Preliminary assessment of the risk linked to furan ingestion by babies consuming only ready-to-eat food

Abstract

The risk linked to furan ingestion has been assessed in previous papers for Belgian adults and children. The present paper focuses on infants consuming only ready-to-eat baby food. As there is no Belgian baby dietary database, the furan exposure assessment was carried out by using an Italian infant consumption database and Belgian contamination data. The estimated daily intake (EDI) was calculated according to a deterministic methodology. It involved 42 commercially available ready-to-eat baby food and 36 baby consumption records. The mean EDI was 1460 ng*(kg_bw*day)⁻¹ which is 3.8 times higher than the 381 ng*(kg_bw*day)⁻¹ reported for Belgian adults, and 3.5 times higher than the 419 ng*(kg_bw*day)⁻¹ measured for Belgian children. To assess and characterise the risk for babies’ exposure, the margin of exposure (MoE) was calculated. It highlighted that 74% of infants have a MoE < 1000, with a minimum of 140. However, these are only preliminary results as they were calculated from a very small dataset and the infant cytochrome P450 activity is significantly different compared with the adult’s. Therefore, the risk linked to furan ingestion by babies should be assessed in a different manner. To this end, additional data regarding a baby diet as well as a better understanding of furan toxicity for babies are needed to characterise more accurately the risk for infants.

Keywords:

• furan
• baby
• risk assessment
• food chain
• deterministic approach
• margin of exposure (MoE)

Acknowledgments

The study was funded by the Belgian Federal Public Service of Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment (Contract No. RT 06/01 FURA). The authors also thank the INRAN Research Group for providing access to its baby dietary database.