Migration Studies of Two Common Components of UV-curing Inks into Food Simulants.

The Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) has reported many cases of different UV curing inks components in foodstuffs during the last few years. These contaminants reach foodstuffs mainly by set-off, their principal migration mechanism from the package. Under this premise, this work has tried to characterize the process of migration of two common UV ink components: a photoinitiator (4-Methylbenzophenone) and a coinitiator (Ethyl-4-(dimethylamino) benzoate), from the most common plastic material used in food packaging low-density polyethylene (LDPE) into six different food simulants. The migration kinetics tests were performed at four different common storage temperatures, obtaining the key migration parameters for both molecules: the coefficients of diffusion and partition. The migration process was highly dependent on the storage conditions, the photoinitiator properties and the pH of the foodstuff.

Validation of the spanish version of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire in Adolescents.

BACKGROUND: The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) is an instrument that assesses nine cognitive strategies to cope with negative situations. The aim of this study was to validate the CERQ for a sample of Spanish adolescents, to analyse reliability and validity, and to examine the factor structure by confirmatory factor analysis. METHOD: The Spanish version of CERQ (CERQ-S) and other scales (gratitude, emotional intelligence, satisfaction with life, depression, anxiety and stress) were completed by 835 adolescents aged 14-18 (455 girls) from the South of Spain. RESULTS: The results showed that the CERQ-S in adolescents (CERQ-SA) has appropriate psychometric properties with indexes of reliability a = .89 and w = .96, and the original nine-factor structure was confirmed. There was also significant correlation between the CERQ-SA and the other scales, showing evidence of convergent validity. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that the CERQ-SA could be useful for appraising cognitive coping in adolescents. This will help to expand the study and understanding of these strategies, their influence and their consequences for adolescents' psychological functioning and health.

Photoinitiators: a food safety review.

Ultraviolet light printing inks are considered safer than the classical inks; however, despite being on the outer surface of the packaging material, their components can migrate into foodstuffs and can give rise to contamination. Photoinitiators are a part of the formulation of printing inks, being an important class of migrant, for which there have been more than 100 incidents of contamination of packaged food with photoinitiators reported through Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) alerts in the European Union. In this review the process of photo-polymerisation is explained in depth to provide an insight into the complexity of the process, and the diversity of potential contaminants together with their degradation products. The critical factors affecting the migration process itself are reviewed, together with analytical methods and the current legislation in the European Union and other parts of the world.