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FAO/WHO GIFT | Global Individual Food Consumption Data Tool

Food Safety 
ACUTE FOOD CONSUMPTION: Daily portion size and percentage of consumers

Ensuring food safety is a public health priority and an essential step to achieving food security. One of the key uses of individual-level quantitative dietary data is refined dietary exposure assessment to chemicals present in foods and drinks. The Codex Alimentarius Commission’s Procedural Manual1 defines exposure assessment as “the qualitative and/or quantitative evaluation of the likely intake of biological, chemical, and physical agents via food as well as exposures from other sources if relevant”. This section of the FAO/WHO GIFT platform provides statistics that can support food safety-related analysis. The food safety infographics were designed to generate statistics supporting acute (≤24 hours) dietary exposure assessments2.

Dietary exposure assessments are an essential element of the risk assessment process for chemicals in food followed by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, joint FAO/WHO committees such as the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) and the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR), and other food regulatory or food safety agencies. During the dietary exposure assessment, food consumption data for a population of interest is combined with the data on concentration of potentially harmful chemical substances in foods. Depending on the purpose of the dietary exposure assessment or data available, the 50th, 95th, 97.5th or 99th percentiles of consumption among consumers only are used to represent food consumption.

The 95th, 97.5th or 99th percentiles refer to food consumption among consumers who report consumption of large amounts of food items or food groups, also known as “high consumers”3.

The FAO/WHO GIFT food safety infographic provides two types of statistics based on food consumption data:

  • Percentage of consumers: The percentage of the population that consumed the selected food or food group during at least one survey day.
  • Daily portion size for high consumers: the 50th, 95th, 97.5th and 99th percentiles of daily portion size of a selected food item or a food group among consumers only, on consumption days.

In addition to the default option of displaying the daily portion size in grams of food per person per day, the platform provides consumption estimates expressed in grams of food per kilogram of body weight per person per day to facilitate the comparison of results with health-based guidance, expressed per kilogram of body weight.

Health-based guidance values for different food chemicals and further information on dietary exposure risk assessment can be found on the Food Safety Collaborative Platform (FOSCOLLAB) (https://apps.who.int/foscollab).
 

 

1 FAO/WHO (2019a). Codex Alimentarius Commission procedural manual, 27th edition. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Codex Alimentarius Commission (http://www.fao.org/3/ca2329en/ca2329en.pdf).

2 Acute dietary exposure is computed using food consumption estimates from a period of one day or a shorter timeframe (i.e. a single eating occasion). Statistics supporting chronic (>24 hours) dietary exposure assessments can be found on the Food Safety Collaborative Platform (FOSCOLLAB) (https://apps.who.int/foscollab).

3 WHO (2020). Chapter 6: Dietary Exposure Assessment of Chemicals in Food (2nd edition), In: Environmental Health Criteria 240 on Principles and Methods for the Risk Assessment of Chemicals in Food, World Health Organization, 2009, pp. 6-1-6-95 (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/food-safety/publications/chapter6-dietary-exposure.pdf?sfvrsn=26d37b15_6).

  • Daily portion size for high consumers in grams of food per kilogram of body weight is calculated only for the datasets in which the variable for subject body weight is available.
  • Implausible, extreme and missing values in the subject body weight variable may be imputed with plausible values specifically for the purpose of calculating the summary statistics presented in FAO/WHO GIFT. FAO does not remove or impute body weight values from the microdata disseminated through the platform, unless the data provider requests it. For each dataset, information on how outliers and/or missing values were treated are available in the survey metadata (i.e. survey details). This should be carefully considered when interpreting the results.
  • Subjects with missing sex and/or age information are excluded from calculation of the statistics.

  • In surveys with multiple days of dietary intake data for the same subject, the food safety statistics are computed using each day of consumption data as a separate daily consumption record.
  • The food safety statistics are calculated for pre-defined population groups: females, males, and both females and males, for the following age groups1:
    • 0 to 35 months old
    • 3 to 5 years old
    • 6 to 14 years old
    • 15 to 49 years old
    • 50 to 74 years old
    • 75 years and older
  • A minimum number of 40 consumption days are applied to display the “Daily portion size for high consumers”. If the minimum number of consumption days is not met, the statistics are not displayed. The minimum number of consumption days was set to ensure that the displayed statistics represent real data points (i.e. 2.5% out of 40 consumption days (referring to the 97.5th percentile) represents at least 1 consumption day).
  • The food safety statistics can be calculated for individual food items or for food safety-sensitive food groups and subgroups.

The calculation procedures can be divided into the following steps:

Percentage of consumers is calculated by determining the percentage of subjects in the survey population that reported consumption of the selected food or food group during at least one survey day.

Daily portion size for high consumers:

  1. The consumption of the same food in one day of recall is summed up to obtain the daily portion size.
    1. To obtain the daily portion size per kilogram of body weight, the daily consumption of each food is divided by the subject’s body weight in kilograms.
    2. To obtain daily portion sizes for the food safety-sensitive food groups, the daily consumption of individual food items within the same food group is summed up.
  2. The 50th, 95th, 97.5th and 99th percentiles of consumption are calculated automatically by the platform for the pre-defined age groups and filters applied for the food items or food groups selected by the user.

 

1 The same age groups as used by the Food Safety Collaborative Platform (FOSCOLLAB) (https://apps.who.int/foscollab).

Foods can be grouped into different categories based on the purpose of the analysis. The food groups presented in the food safety infographics were created based on the FAO/WHO GIFT nutrition-sensitive food groups, with some modifications both at the food group and food subgroup level responding to specific requirements of the dietary exposure assessment. In particular, the food safety-sensitive food grouping has a more disaggregated food subgroup level to allow for more precise aggregated analysis. Aflatoxins, methylmercury and veterinary drugs served as model hazards in creating the food safety-sensitive food groups. In addition, the food grouping used by the FAO/WHO Chronic Individual Food Consumption Database – Summary Statistics (CIFOCOss), now integrated into the FOSCOLLAB platform, was considered to ensure maximum possible coherence with other similar classifications.

Datasets shared through FAO/WHO GIFT are first mapped to the FoodEx2 classification and description system. Every FoodEx2 base term is associated to a food safety-sensitive food group and food subgroup which is used to display statistics using standardised queries.

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