EFSA 2012 - Cadmium dietary exposure in Europe

The European Food Safety Authority reviewed cadmium occurrence in foods on the European market and estimated dietary exposure using the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database. Food was the dominant exposure pathway considered for the non-smoking population. The report provides broad FoodEx occurrence statistics and exposure-contribution rankings for cadmium; it does not provide brand-level product comparisons.

Key numbers

The final occurrence dataset comprised 178,541 cadmium results. About half of the available food samples were non-detects or below the limit of quantification. Individual quantified values ranged from 0.001 µg/kg in drinking water to 61,000 µg/kg in horse kidney.

Table 1 reports FoodEx Level 1 sample counts, left-censoring proportions, and LOD/LOQ ranges in µg/kg. Selected categories relevant to HMTc routing include:

Table 2 reports lower-, middle-, and upper-bound mean cadmium occurrence values in µg/kg for FoodEx categories matched to consumption. Selected middle-bound means include:

The report states that 13 of 144 FoodEx categories with consumption information had a middle-bound mean above 100 µg/kg, including algal formulations, cocoa powder, bitter and bitter-sweet chocolate, crustaceans, edible offal, fish and seafood not specified beyond FoodEx Level 1, frogs’ legs, cultivated fungi, wild fungi, oilseeds, seaweeds, and water molluscs.

For lifetime dietary exposure, the overall middle-bound weekly average was estimated at 2.04 µg/kg body weight, and a potential middle-bound 95th percentile was estimated at 3.66 µg/kg body weight. Individual dietary survey results varied between a weekly minimum lower-bound average of 1.15 and maximum upper-bound average of 7.84 µg/kg body weight; the lower-bound-to-upper-bound 95th percentile range was 2.01 to 12.1 µg/kg body weight.

The main broad contributors to cadmium exposure across age groups were grains and grain products (26.9%), vegetables and vegetable products (16.0%), and starchy roots and tubers (13.2%). At more detailed category level, potatoes (13.2%), bread and rolls (11.7%), fine bakery wares (5.1%), chocolate products (4.3%), leafy vegetables (3.9%), and water molluscs (3.2%) contributed most across age groups. At the finest detail summarized in the report, wheat bread and rolls contributed 6.4%, boiled potatoes 5.7%, pastries and cakes 4.0%, potatoes unspecified 3.1%, rice 3.0%, and carrots 2.2%.

Methods (brief)

EFSA used cadmium occurrence results submitted through the 2007 call for data and later annual contaminant-data submissions. Results with LOD above 100 µg/kg or LOQ above 200 µg/kg were excluded. Foods were grouped by the FoodEx classification system and matched to individual-level food consumption and body-weight data from chronic dietary surveys in the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database. Lower-, middle-, and upper-bound exposure estimates were calculated to handle left-censored data; lower-bound exposure was used to rank food-group contributions.

Implications

This report is an A-tier European regulatory occurrence and dietary-exposure anchor for cadmium in food. It supports broad cadmium routing for grains, vegetables, potatoes, seafood/shellfish, seaweed, cocoa/chocolate, spices, infant foods, and drinking-water categories. The FoodEx summary means are not HMTc standards and should not be treated as jurisdiction-specific clean/dirty percentiles; they are occurrence and exposure inputs that preserve EFSA’s left-censoring assumptions and European market scope.

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout; the abstract, Summary, Sections 2.1-2.3, Table 1, Table 2, Discussion, and Conclusions were checked in /tmp/ingest_f3_efsa2012_cadmium.txt.
• DOI 10.2903/j.efsa.2012.2551 appeared only as a citation in an existing EU regulation source page, not as an existing source-page identity; raw handle and cite-key checks found no duplicate source page before creation.
• Table 1 and selected Table 2 numbers were copied exactly as µg/kg; weekly exposure estimates were copied as µg/kg body weight or µg/kg b.w. as stated by the source. No unit conversion was performed.
• Speciation: cadmium is reported as cadmium occurrence; no cadmium species conversion is involved.
• Brand firewall: the report aggregates FoodEx categories and European survey data; no brand-level values are attached to contamination results.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; missing narrow closed-vocabulary product slugs include water molluscs, crustaceans, algal formulations, bitter chocolate, bitter-sweet chocolate, boiled potatoes, pastries/cakes, and carrots, so broad category routing is used.

Page history

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