Quantifying the Effect of Permanent Dietary Transitions in the North on Human Exposure to Persistent Organic Pollutants

摘要

For aboriginal human populations in the Arctic, the main route of persistent organic pollutant (POP) exposure is via traditional food consumption. Previous work by our group indicated that an ongoing dietary transition away from traditional foods and toward imported foods contributes to decreasing POP exposures observed in these populations. To further explore this issue, we expanded the human food chain bioaccumulation model ACC-Human Arctic by including models for organisms deemed to be important elements of a traditional Northern diet (beluga whale, narwhal, caribou). We then parameterized the expanded model to simulate POP intake in two specific aboriginal populations in Canada's North (from the Inuvik region, Northwest Territories and Baffin Island region, Nunavut). Using dietary survey information from initial and follow-up biomonitoring campaigns in both communities, we simulated POP exposures for each individual study participant. We found that the amounts and frequencies of traditional food consumption were the most important predictors of POP exposure. Further, both declining Arctic environmental POP contamination and reduced traditional food consumption contributed significantly to the decrease in human POP concentrations between the initial and follow-up study. Ultimately, our model approach allowed us to characterize the roles of POP emission reductions and dietary transitions in influencing historical POP exposures among two specific Northern communities, and further underscored the importance of accounting for dietary transition behavior in future POP biomonitoring within these populations.