ABSTRACT
How safe is it to eat this food or this diet? This is the central question of food toxicology. To answer that simple question, we must consider the toxicity of food components, either as single components or as mixtures. We must also consider the methods used to determine toxicity. While all food components may be toxic at some level, food toxicology is primarily concerned with those that may have harmful effects at low doses. These effects may be acute (apparent after only one exposure) or chronic (effects that are only observed after repeated exposures). Acute effects would include the ingestion of bacterial toxins at a single meal, with an onset of symptoms occurring within hours or days. Chronic effects might include drinking water contaminated with arsenic, where symptoms only appear after months or years of consumption. In toxicology, something that may cause harm is referred to as a hazard. Risk is the probability of being harmed by a particular hazard. The determination of risk, better known as risk assessment, seeks to understand both the hazard and degree of exposure to it, in order to answer the “how safe is it?” question. Doseresponse experiments involving cell culture and animal models are a key component of risk assessment: the estimation of how safe or unsafe a food might be. While the use of animals is viewed as essential in toxicology today, it raises controversy and questions about how well experimental results apply to humans. Our diets, the food we choose to eat on a daily basis, may be the ultimate dose-response experiment, since we eat and drink mixtures of thousands of compounds each day, each with a different toxic dose.
