Application of Risk Assessment in Nutrition

Abstract

In 1995, an agreement was made at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the
United Nation/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) Expert Consultation that risk assessment
should be carried out for biological and chemical agents for food standards issues.1 Since
then, risk assessment has been considerably evolved in the last two decades as a science-based
activity to inform the regulatory public health policy decision making in agri-food field.2,3 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.2 Currently, there has been important improvement in methodologies
of data collection, evidence synthesis, and computational techniques for risk assessments
that focus on the microbial and chemical hazards along food supply chains. However,
risk assessment applications in nutrition (called nutritional risk assessment here) is beyond the
areas that have originally been considered as the public health risk assessment realm.