ABSTRACT
Air, water, soil, and food are all unavoidable components of the human environment. Each of those elements influences the quality of human life, and each of them may be contaminated. Food is not only the elementary source of nutrients, but may also contain natural chemical substances with toxic properties, e.g., cyanogenic glycosides (many plants), solanine (green parts of potatoes, sprouted potatoes, and potatoes stored in light), industrial pollutants (heavy metals), biogenic amines (fish), or mycotoxins (moldy foodstuffs).
