JECFA 91st Meeting (2022) — Cadmium Dietary Exposure Assessment
Summary
This is the WHO Food Additives Series No. 82 monograph on cadmium, prepared by the 91st meeting of the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (held online November 2020, published 2022). Its scope is a dietary exposure assessment, not a re-derivation of the health-based guidance value: the provisional tolerable monthly intake of 25 µg per kilogram body weight per month, established at JECFA’s 73rd meeting in 2010 and published in WHO Technical Report Series No. 960 (2011), remains in force and is carried forward unchanged by this 91st meeting document. The 91st meeting was requested by the 13th session of the Codex Committee on Contaminants in Foods to reassess dietary exposure incorporating new 2019 occurrence data on cadmium in cocoa and cocoa-derived products, which showed higher concentrations than the 77th meeting (2013) cocoa-specific assessment had recognized. The monograph finds that national adult mean dietary cadmium exposure across reviewed countries ranges between 9 and 48 percent of the PTMI, that European children under age 12 reach roughly 47 percent, and that high-percentile child exposures in Australia and the USA reach 82 to 88 percent of the PTMI; when cocoa-product contributions are added, total dietary exposure for children aged 0.5 to 12 years can reach 96 percent of the PTMI, essentially saturating the monthly tolerable intake.
Key numbers
Provisional Tolerable Monthly Intake (carried forward from the 73rd meeting, not re-derived here):
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| PTMI | 25 µg Cd/kg body weight per month |
| Establishing meeting | JECFA 73rd, 2010 (report published 2011 as WHO TRS 960) |
| Basis for monthly window | The long biological half-life of cadmium in humans |
Approximate weekly-equivalent conversion for cross-reference comparison (not a JECFA-stated value): 25 ÷ (30 ÷ 7) ≈ 5.83 µg Cd/kg body weight per week. This is provided here for comparison to the EFSA TWI of 2.5 µg/kg b.w./week and similar weekly-denominated reference values; JECFA’s formal guidance remains monthly.
National adult mean dietary cadmium exposure (all foods), expressed as percent of PTMI:
| Population | Mean (µg/kg b.w./month) | Percent of PTMI |
|---|---|---|
| National adult means across reviewed countries | 2.2 to 12 | 9 to 48 |
Dietary cadmium exposure, specific populations:
| Population | Mean or P97.5 (µg/kg b.w./month) | Percent of PTMI |
|---|---|---|
| European children up to age 12 (mean) | 11.9 | 47 |
| Adult high-percentile, Europe / Lebanon / USA | 6.9 to 12.1 | 28 to 48 |
| Children 0.5 to 12 years high-percentile, Australia and USA | 20.4 to 22.0 | 82 to 88 |
Updated 2020 cocoa-inclusive dietary exposure assessment (the central new work of this monograph):
| Population | Total dietary Cd (µg/kg b.w./month) | Percent of PTMI |
|---|---|---|
| Adults, estimate including cocoa contributions | 7.4 to 17.2 | 30 to 69 |
| Children 0.5 to 12 years, including cocoa contributions | up to 23.9 | 96 |
Cocoa-specific exposure findings, 2020 reassessment:
| Matrix | P97.5 exposure (µg/kg b.w./month) |
|---|---|
| Cocoa products overall, mean across GEMS/Food cluster diets (assumed body weight 60 kg) | 0.005 to 0.39 (0.2 to 1.6 percent of PTMI) |
| Individual cocoa products (cocoa beverages, cocoa powder, other) at national level | 0.001 to 0.46 (0.004 to 1.8 percent of PTMI) |
| Cocoa powder alone, European children aged 7 to 11 (highest high exposure) | 12 |
Occurrence data underlying the 2020 reassessment:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Source | GEMS/Food contaminants database, records submitted since 1 January 2011 |
| Total records in the cleaned dataset | 277,292 |
| Records from WHO European Region | 216,373 (78 percent) |
| Cluster coverage | 10 of 17 GEMS/Food cluster diets represented |
| LOD cutoff applied in analysis | 20 µg/kg (approximately 2 SD above the mean LOD across the dataset) |
| Most frequently analysed food types | Edible pig offal (7.3 percent of records), marine fish (6.9 percent), cattle meat (3.7 percent) |
Major commodity contributors to total mean dietary cadmium exposure across the GEMS/Food regional diets (consistent across the five regional diets assessed at prior JECFA meetings 61 and 64, reaffirmed in this monograph’s historical review): rice, wheat, root vegetables, tuber vegetables, leafy vegetables, other vegetables, and molluscs, collectively accounting for 40 to 85 percent of total mean dietary cadmium exposure depending on regional diet.
Methods (brief)
The dietary exposure assessment combined occurrence data from the FAO/WHO Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) Food contaminants database with food consumption data from the GEMS/Food cluster diets and from the FAO/WHO Chronic Individual Food Consumption Database (CIFOCOss). The occurrence dataset was restricted to records submitted since the previous cadmium assessment (January 2011), cleaned to remove aggregate analyses, records with no result, and records on animal feed, and standardized to µg/kg. A dataset cutoff of 20 µg/kg on reported LODs was applied to address non-detect treatment consistency. A subset of 714 records under the “sugar” descriptor with implausibly high cadmium concentrations (up to 12,000 µg/kg) were excluded as unsupported by the literature.
The Committee did not derive new national estimates of dietary exposure for specific countries because the combination of CIFOCOss consumption data, GEMS/Food occurrence data, and existing recent national assessments did not meet the Committee’s established criteria for new-estimate derivation. National estimates reported in this monograph are drawn from the scientific and grey literature since 2011 and compiled for comparison.
The 2020 reassessment’s cocoa-specific component used expanded 2019 occurrence data submitted in response to a 2019 JECFA Secretariat call for data issued at the request of the 13th session of the Codex Committee on Contaminants in Foods. That dataset covered a wider geographical range of cocoa-product occurrence than the 77th meeting 2013 assessment and recorded higher mean cadmium concentrations in cocoa products than previously noted.
Limitations the monograph itself flags: data coverage is uneven across GEMS/Food clusters (10 of 17 clusters represented), with European Region data dominating the overall dataset. For several clusters, available data were limited in quantity or restricted to a narrow range of foods; for example, cluster G09 data came solely from Indonesia and were restricted to 30 cocoa-product samples.
Implications
- Certification: the PTMI of 25 µg/kg b.w./month is the international reference value that Codex Alimentarius maximum levels are aligned against. HMT&C thresholds that calibrate to the JECFA PTMI rather than to the tighter EFSA TWI would meet international consensus but would be substantially less stringent than EU regulatory practice. The 82 to 88 percent of PTMI observed in high-percentile child exposures in Australia and the USA (and the 96 percent when cocoa is included) implies that tightening beyond current Codex MLs is warranted for children specifically, and HMT&C’s child-product certification tiers should reflect this. See synthesis for the broader EFSA-JECFA reconciliation still pending.
- Courses: the JECFA methodology (dietary-intake reference value, monthly averaging window reflecting the long biological half-life of cadmium) is distinct from the EFSA CONTAM methodology (biomarker-anchored weekly TWI via kinetic back-translation) and from the US EPA IRIS methodology (RfD with uncertainty factors). Contrasting the three on the same metal is a teachable example of how agency procedure drives the numeric reference value.
- App: this monograph substantially strengthens the evidence base for a cocoa ingredient page. Cocoa powder specifically reached 12 µg/kg b.w./month at the 97.5th percentile for European children 7 to 11, driven solely by cocoa powder consumption. Chocolate, cocoa beverages, and cocoa powder should be standing ingredient stubs as soon as the ingredient wave begins. The monograph also confirms rice, wheat, root vegetables, tuber vegetables, leafy vegetables, and molluscs as the dominant population-level cadmium contributors, aligned with the EFSA finding, which gives high confidence to contamination-profile population for these commodities in the app layer.
- Microbiome: not addressed in this monograph.
Provenance notes
License CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0-IGO (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Intergovernmental Organization). Redistribution is permitted for non-commercial purposes with attribution and under the same or equivalent license. The Heavy Metal Index is operated as infrastructure for a commercial certification program, which means the NC clause is not trivially satisfied; factual data is extractable because facts are not copyrightable, but verbatim reproduction of substantial textual passages, figures, or tables is not permitted. Exposure statistics, the PTMI value, and commodity-contribution findings on this source page are facts synthesized and paraphrased from the monograph rather than lifted verbatim.
The PTMI of 25 µg/kg b.w./month is attributed in this monograph to the 73rd meeting of JECFA “in 2011”; the 73rd meeting itself was held in June 2010, and the report (WHO Technical Report Series No. 960) was published in 2011. The primary derivation document for the PTMI is WHO TRS 960 (2011) plus the associated JECFA monograph from the 73rd meeting; neither is in the current corpus and both are flagged as pending ingest. The 91st meeting monograph cited here captures the PTMI value and its provenance, which is sufficient to populate the regulation page with full transparency about the derivation source gap. Full methodology capture (critical study, uncertainty factors, kinetic modeling details) requires ingest of the 73rd meeting documents.