ABSTRACT
There has been a burgeoning public awareness about the consumption of healthy, nutritious food and staying t. Furthermore, there is a mounting concern about food safety from the standpoint of microbial contamination and contamination by a variety of chemicals. These chemicals have been shown to occur as natural toxicants in produce (glycoalkaloids, glucosinolates, saponins, illudane sesquiterpenes, etc.) or those used during pre-and postharvest of agricultural crops, fruits, and vegetables (agrochemicals). Other chemical contaminants include feed supplements for livestock and industrial chemicals (chlorinated hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [PAHs], heterocyclic amines, phthalates, heavy metals, etc., as reviewed in Creaser and Purchase [1991] and D’Mello [2003]). Therefore, from a food safety and regulatory perspective, monitoring of foodstuffs for chemical residues is warranted. From a human health standpoint, the processes by which these chemicals are absorbed through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and cause toxicity and/or cancer are also important. Because there are several hundreds of food toxicants belonging to various chemical classes with differing physicochemical properties and environmental loadings, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to deal with each chemical class and address their absorption processes and the factors that inuence these processes. Therefore, in this treatise, we will focus on the absorption of PAH family of toxicants. These compounds that are environmental and dietary toxicants are also implicated as causative agents for lung, breast, and colon cancers and cause toxicity to the nervous, reproductive, developmental, and cardiovascular systems (for comprehensive reviews refer to WHO, 2010; Ramesh et al., 2011).
