Hygiena 2024, 69(3):90-92 | DOI: 10.21101/hygiena.a1865

Dietary exposure monitoring – celebrating 30th anniversary

Jiří Ruprich, Irena Řehůřková, Marcela Dofková, Jitka Blahová

Státní zdravotní ústav, Praha, Česká republika

Since 1994, the National Institute of Public Health has been entrusted with guaranteeing the Environmental Health Monitoring System. This year (2024), we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of this system. The goal of the system is to achieve a systematic and transparent assessment of environmental and health effects that affect the Czech population. Dietary exposure plays an important role. The monitoring of dietary exposure requires the knowledge of the national food consumption at an individual level, determination of important foods in the usual diet, usual culinary preparations, combination into composite samples for laboratory analysis of chemical substances of interest, and calculation of exposure doses and characterization of the health risk for consumers. Currently, the two-year cycle 2024/2025 is taking place according to the set system. During the previous cycle (2022/2023), food samples were taken in 8 periods and 4 regions of the country. Totally 96 purchases in 40 different places across the whole country plus 8 online purchases were made. A total of 3,432 individual food samples were collected. The foods were culinary processed and mixed into 143 individual types of composite samples. In total, 880 regional and 220 representative composite samples were analyzed for approximately 70 chemical substances over a two-year period. The results are broadly compared in the long term to monitor a trend in the development of the chronic exposure dose for contaminants and the intake adequacy for nutrients. The health risks assessment based on dietary exposure monitoring data has among others contributed to better governmental decisions with significant positive economic impacts.

Keywords: dietary exposure, monitoring, Total Diet Study (TDS)

Received: August 2024; Accepted: September 15, 2024; Published: September 30, 2024  Show citation