EFSA CONTAM 2009 — Cadmium in Food

The European Food Safety Authority Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain Scientific Opinion on cadmium in food, adopted 30 January 2009 in response to Question No EFSA-Q-2007-138 from the European Commission. It establishes the EU tolerable weekly intake for cadmium at 2.5 µg per kilogram body weight per week, superseding the long-standing Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives provisional tolerable weekly intake of 7 µg/kg b.w./week. The derivation anchors on renal tubular dysfunction measured via urinary beta-2-microglobulin through a group-based BMDL5 of 4 µg cadmium per gram creatinine, a chemical-specific adjustment factor of 3.9, and a one-compartment kinetic model fit to non-smoking Swedish women that translates a critical urinary cadmium of 1.0 µg/g creatinine into a daily dietary intake of 0.36 µg/kg b.w., rounded to a weekly intake of 2.5 µg/kg b.w. The Panel concluded that mean European adult exposure is close to or slightly exceeding the TWI, with subgroups including vegetarians, children, smokers, and residents of highly contaminated areas exceeding the TWI by approximately twofold, and recommended that population-level exposure be reduced.

Key numbers

Tolerable weekly intake established by this opinion:

Derivation parameters (p. 107–108):

European dietary cadmium exposure estimates, adults (p. 107):

Italian population subgroup data, dietary cadmium exposure (p. 48, Table 28):

Mean dietary cadmium exposure for children 12 years of age or less was approximately 60 percent greater than for adults, primarily due to greater food consumption relative to body weight. A UK Total Diet Study (FSA 2009) separately reported that toddlers in the 1.5 to 4.5 year range had exposure 165 percent higher than adults.

Infant intake estimates from a Czech study of 35 breast milk samples from non-smoking mothers and 8 infant formula samples:

Occurrence data analyzed: approximately 140,000 samples on cadmium occurrence in food commodities, collected 2003 to 2007 from 20 EU Member States. Highest cadmium concentrations were observed in seaweed, fish and seafood, chocolate, and foods for special dietary uses, with fungi, oilseeds, and edible offal as specific high-concentration items. For most foods fewer than 5 percent of samples exceeded the EU maximum level under Regulation (EC) No. 1881/2006 where specified; up to 20 percent of samples exceeded the ML for celeriac, horse meat, fish, and bivalve molluscs other than oysters and cephalopods.

Major dietary contributors to overall cadmium exposure in the EU general population (p. 107): cereals and cereal products, vegetables, nuts and pulses, starchy roots and potatoes, meat and meat products. The opinion includes per-country contribution breakdowns (Figure 7) showing considerable variation across Member States.

Toxicokinetic and general toxicology anchors from this opinion:

Methods (brief)

The opinion is a risk assessment combining occurrence data, consumption data, and dose-response modeling. Occurrence data were solicited from EU Member States and covered approximately 140,000 samples collected 2003 to 2007. Consumption data were drawn from EFSA’s Concise European Food Consumption database, with national dietary surveys used for specific sub-groups including French vegetarians and Italian children. Analytical methods across the reporting laboratories included ICP-MS and atomic absorption spectrometry variants; the opinion notes limit-of-detection differences across laboratories and addresses lower-bound / upper-bound treatment of non-detects.

The hazard characterization used a meta-analysis of studies relating urinary cadmium to urinary beta-2-microglobulin, fitting a Hill model separately for subjects over age 50 and for the whole population. The group-based BMDL5 of 4 µg U-Cd/g creatinine was divided by a chemical-specific adjustment factor of 3.9 for inter-individual variation in urinary cadmium to produce the reference point of 1.0 µg U-Cd/g creatinine. A one-compartment toxicokinetic model was then fit to a Swedish cohort of non-smoking women (age 58 to 70) that included both dietary cadmium intake and urinary cadmium; the model translates the 1.0 µg/g creatinine reference point at age 50 into the dietary intake that keeps 95 percent of the population below that urinary value. The Panel explicitly notes that no additional adjustment or uncertainty factor was applied for individual susceptibility because the underlying data were already drawn from an early-biological-response endpoint and a sensitive population.

Limitations the opinion itself flags: the Italian children data set is small (n = 88 toddlers, n = 105 children), cross-country variability in food contribution is substantial, and the genotoxicity and cancer data were deemed insufficient for quantitative dose-response modeling (hence the TWI rests on the renal endpoint, not on carcinogenicity).

Implications

• Reference value: this opinion establishes the EU reference value for cadmium dietary exposure (TWI 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week). The TWI is the tighter of the two major international cadmium reference values; the 2010 JECFA PTMI corresponds to a higher weekly-equivalent dose.
• Occurrence base: the 140,000-sample EU occurrence dataset and the food-group contribution breakdowns are a high-confidence input for ingredient-level cadmium contamination profiles across cereals, leafy vegetables, root vegetables, potatoes, nuts, oilseeds, pulses, meat, offal, fish, molluscs, chocolate, and mushrooms when synthesis runs.
• Subgroup exposure: the subgroup exposure estimates (vegetarians at 5.4, bivalve consumers at 4.6, wild-mushroom consumers at 4.3 µg/kg b.w./week) and the child-vs-adult ratio (~60 percent higher relative exposure for children ≤12) are the per-population values the dietary-pattern sections of ingredient and product pages should cite.
• Microbiome: not specifically addressed in this opinion; broader microbiome-cadmium literature enters through other ingest tracks.

Provenance notes

License class public-reference-only. EFSA’s scientific opinions are publicly available but not licensed for redistribution; the raw PDF is held privately under raw/ and the access_url points to the EFSA Journal landing page for verification. The DOI 10.2903/j.efsa.2009.980 resolves through doi.org to the same record.

A 2011 EFSA statement reaffirmed this TWI after JECFA published a divergent provisional tolerable monthly intake in 2010. The 2011 statement has its own source page at efsa-cadmium-2011-statement and did not change the numeric TWI value.

Verification notes

2026-06-02 — Merge-enhance via /ingest-next-manual-fetch-pdf from manual-fetch/Kimi_Agent_Download Corruption Issue/condiments2_papers/03_Condiments/08b_EFSA_cadmium_food_2009_alt.pdf. The Kimi alt PDF is the same EFSA Journal 980 opinion already on file at raw/reports/EFSA_Cadmium_ScientificOpinion.pdf (DOI match, byte length within 1 byte, content identical on spot-checks of pp. 1–3, 48, 107–108); recorded under near_duplicates. Numerical values (TWI 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week, BMDL5 4 µg U-Cd/g creatinine, CSAF 3.9, reference U-Cd 1.0 µg/g creatinine, Italian Table 28 means and P95s, adult mean exposure 2.3 µg/kg b.w./week, vegetarian 5.4, bivalve 4.6, mushroom 4.3) re-verified against the alt PDF and unchanged. Schema fixes applied: added raw_handle: KADC_08b-efsa-cadmium-food-2009-alt; added matrices: [dietary-intake, urine] (clears the routing_malformed advisory); added sampling_year_range: [2003, 2007]; removed legacy ## Summary heading (current schema uses un-headed opening prose under H1); removed legacy ## Wiki pages updated on ingest list; rewrote ## Implications to drop Part 2 wiki/HMTc-firewall violations (the prior version contained HMTc threshold-calibration reasoning — “HMT&C must decide whether to calibrate to EFSA or JECFA” and “Calibrating to EFSA is the more conservative posture” — which is HMTc policy work that does not belong on a source page). No source-content claims were changed.

2026-06-02 — Audit subagent (general-purpose, fresh context) verdict REVISE. Checks 1, 3, 4, 5 all ✅ (numerical fidelity verified table-by-table against the PDF; methods/speciation accurate; brand firewall clean; wiki/HMTc firewall clean). Check 2 ⚠️ flagged products: [infant-formula] as not in the taxonomy snapshot — verified false positive: wiki/products/infant-formula.md exists in the live wiki, and the routing audit resolves the slug cleanly (one direct_evidence row for infant-formula plus four broad_formula_context rows fanning to the form-specific siblings, which is the Part 5b broad-scope pattern). The snapshot at docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md is stale relative to the live wiki for this slug. No page change applied. The matrices entries dietary-intake and urine are also not enumerated in the snapshot’s matrices section but are accepted by routing (the advisory flag has cleared); they describe the actual analytical scope of this opinion.

2026-06-03 — Third copy of the same EFSA Journal 980 opinion surfaced in raw/Manual Fetch Kimi /June 3 Folder/EFSA Journal - 2009 - - Cadmium in food ‐ Scientific opinion of the Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain.pdf (sha256 8e367628…). DOI grep, raw_handle grep, and cite-key grep all confirm this is the same paper already at efsa-cadmium-contam-2009. Spot-checked pp. 1–3 of the June 3 PDF against the existing page’s Key numbers — TWI 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week, daily intake 0.36, BMDL5 4 µg U-Cd/g creatinine, CSAF 3.9, reference U-Cd 1.0, adult mean 2.3 (range 1.9–3.0), high consumer 3.0 (range 2.5–3.9), vegetarian 5.4, bivalve 4.6, wild mushroom 4.3, 140,000 samples 2003–2007 from 20 EU Member States — all match. Recorded the June 3 PDF as a third near_duplicates entry; no page content changed.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. 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.