An Exposome-Based Approach to Environmental and Nutritional Impacts of Food on Human Health

摘要

Development of sustainable products requires comparing direct impacts on the user and indirect impacts such as environmental pollution in a consistent exposome-based approach. We currently lack tools that can comparably quantify environmental impacts and nutritional health effects at the food level. Here, we evaluate and compare impacts associated with foods, accounting for nutrition, particulate matter (PM) from food production, and chemical migration from food packaging. We test this approach on a pizza case study. We quantify the Dietary Risk Factors (DRF) as the disease, gender and age-specific health burden attributable to a g of 15 risk components identified to pose risk on health according to the Global Burden of Diseases, expressed in disability adjusted life years (DALYs/g). We multiply DRFs with the corresponding component densities (grisk/servingfood) for 6000+ foods, to yield the Health Nutritional Index (HENI) measured in DALYs per serving. We evaluate in parallel exposures (intake fractions) associated with ammonia emissions during food production and chemicals migrating from food packaging and use dose-responses and severity factors to evaluate their impacts in DALYs. DRFs range from -57 pDALY/gomega-3 to 8 μDALY/gsodium, with ischemic heart disease dominating the burden associated with most risks. HENI scores for 68 pizzas range from -3 to 36 μDALY/serving (median: 17 μDALY/serving), with meat pizzas having the highest impacts and vegetarian or fruit pizzas the lowest. The corresponding PM impacts are substantially lower wth a median of 0.15 μDALY/serving. Environmental impacts are strongly correlated with nutritional impacts, signifying that unhealthy foods also have the highest environmental impacts and vice-versa (rC02=0.69, rPM2.5=0.77). For food contact material, the product intake fraction (PiF) typically ranges from 1E-4 to 0.8 and when combined with effect data it can yield impact estimates in μDALY/serving.