ABSTRACT
The history of food toxicity might have started as early as Hippocrates made the statement “let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food,” which presaged the modern science by over two millennia ago. Not until the development of modern biochemistry, molecular biology, cell culture techniques, computer science, and bioinformatics, it has been possible to identify and characterize potential toxicants in food (Paustenbach, 2000; Barlow et al., 2002; Eisenbrand et al., 2002; Houck and Kavlock, 2008; Sun et al., 2012; Ahuja and Sharma, 2014; Knudsen et al., 2015). Mechanistic insights gained by toxicity assessment in food using different models from in vitro biochemical, cell-based in vitro, animal in vivo to clinical settings were leading to a better food safety. The growing interest is reected by stunning 6240 publications in PubMed as of January 2016 when combining “food, toxicity, review” with exploding numbers of over 100 reviews per year starting from 1995.
