Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA)

International (FAO/WHO) · Advisory — health-based guidance to Codex · Established 1956 · Authored by Karen Pendergrass, Institute of Contaminant Standards · www.who.int

Quick read

JECFA is the joint expert committee of the FAO and WHO that performs international risk assessments of additives and contaminants in food. Like EFSA it sets health-based guidance — provisional tolerable weekly or monthly intakes (PTWI/PTMI) — not binding limits; its conclusions feed the Codex Alimentarius standard-setting process. Its most consequential heavy-metal action was withdrawing the lead PTWI in 2010, concluding that no level of lead intake can be considered without risk.

Mandate & scope

Convened since 1956, JECFA gives the FAO and WHO independent scientific evaluations of additives and contaminants in food. It derives provisional tolerable intakes — the word “provisional” marking incomplete data — that serve as the toxicological basis for Codex Alimentarius maximum levels. For the metals the Index tracks it maintains a cadmium PTMI of 25 µg/kg b.w./month and a methylmercury PTWI of 1.6 µg/kg b.w./week. In 2010 it withdrew the long-standing lead PTWI of 25 µg/kg b.w./week after concluding the value was no longer health-protective and that dose-response modelling showed effects on IQ and blood pressure with no identifiable threshold. JECFA’s values are advisory: they carry international weight through Codex adoption but are not themselves enforceable in any jurisdiction.

Positions across metals

Where it diverges

JECFA’s intake values share EFSA’s basis (per kilogram body weight) and are the closest cross-body comparison available — for methylmercury, JECFA’s PTWI of 1.6 µg/kg b.w./week sits slightly above EFSA’s 1.3, a difference in critical study and uncertainty factors, not a substantive disagreement. They are not comparable with concentration limits (EU maximum levels, FDA action levels) expressed per kilogram of a specific food. JECFA’s 2010 lead withdrawal aligns it with EFSA’s no-threshold position; both reject the implicit reassurance of any numeric “tolerable” lead intake.

Lead

Cadmium

Inorganic arsenic

Methylmercury

Update log

Key documents

References

Positions, the update log, and key documents above are generated from the per-instrument regulation pages this body issues, via tools/build-regulator-pages.mjs. The wiki reports what JECFA has published; it does not endorse it. See the wiki/HMTc separation policy for why reporting regulatory values is kept architecturally separate from certification threshold-setting.

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.