Food group consumption in an Italian population using the updated food classification system FoodEx2: Results from the Italian Nutrition & HEalth Survey (INHES) study.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Dietary habits evolve over time, being influenced by many factors and complex interactions. This work aimed at evaluating the updated information on food group consumption in Italy. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 8944 (4768 women and 4176 men) participants aged >18 years from all over Italy recruited in 2010-13 (Italian Nutrition & HEalth Survey, INHES) was analyzed. The recruitment was performed using computer-assisted-telephone-interviewing and one-day 24-h dietary recall retrieved from all participants. The updated, second version, of FoodEx2 food classification system was applied to extract data on food group consumption. The participation rate was 53%; 6.2% of the participants declared to follow a special diet, the most prevalent being hypo-caloric diets (55.7% of special diets). Men compared to women presented significantly higher intakes of "grains and grain-based products", "meat and meat products", "animal and vegetable fats and oils and primary derivatives" and "alcoholic beverages" (P for all<0.001); moreover, men had lower intakes of "milk and dairy products", "water and water-based beverages" and "products for non-standard diets, food imitates and food supplements" (P for all<0.001). Differences in food group intake among age groups, geographical regions and educational level groups were also identified (P for all<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Data on the consumption of more than 70 food groups and sub-groups were illustrated in different strata. The present analysis could be considered as an updated source of information for future nutrition research in Italy and in the EU.

FoodEx2 Harmonization of the Food Consumption Database from the Italian IV SCAI Children's Survey.

Estimating the habitual food and nutrient intakes of a population is based on dietary assessment methods that collect detailed information on food consumption. Establishing the list of foods to be used for collecting data in dietary surveys is central to standardizing data collection. Comparing foods across different data sources is always challenging. Nomenclatures, detail, and classification into broad food groups and sub-groups can vary considerably. The use of a common system for classifying and describing foods is an important prerequisite for analyzing data from different sources. At the European level, EFSA has addressed this need through the development and maintenance of the FoodEx2 classification system. The aim of this work is to present the FoodEx2 harmonization of foods, beverages, and food supplements consumed in the IV SCAI children's survey carried out in Italy. Classifying foods into representative food categories predefined at European level for intake and exposure assessment may lead to a loss of information. On the other hand, a major advantage is the comparability of data from different national databases. The FoodEx2 classification of the national food consumption database represented a step forward in the standardization of the data collection and registration. The large use of FoodEx2 categories at a high level of detail (core and extended terms) combined with the use of descriptors (facets) has minimized information loss and made the reference food categories at country level comparable with different food databases at national and international level.

Nutritional Data on Selected Food Products Consumed in Oman: An Update of the Food Composition Table and Use for Future Food Consumption Surveys.

Food composition data in the Eastern Mediterranean Region countries are often lacking, obsolete, or unreliable. The study aims to provide reliable nutrient data on food products consumed in Oman in order to evaluate their nutritional quality, the consistency of the nutrition labeling and claims, and, ultimately, the use for food consumption surveys and update the current food composition database. Contents of fat, fatty acids, carbohydrates, protein, sugars, and sodium were chemically analyzed in 221 foods and beverages. Products were classified according to their nutritional composition and the extent of processing and coded according to the FoodEx2 system. Labels and laboratory values were compared using the tolerance levels of the European Union. Results indicate that the nutrition labeling aligns with the values obtained in the laboratory, with the exception of 6.3% discrepancies in TFA content, where the reported values are higher than the appropriate reference values. The most frequent category (71.5%) was ultra-processed foods. In terms of inconsistencies in the nutritional claims, 5.1% of food products with claims did not comply with the statement "sugar-free" or "low salt". Our study provides evidence to support the necessity of comprehensive recommendations for consumers and food industries, which are aimed at enhancing the nutritional quality of products and augmenting consumer awareness.

Opportunities and challenges in using NIH's Dietary Supplement Label Database for research on non-nutrient ingredients: Use case for ingredients in honeybee products.

Background: Non-nutrient bioactive ingredients of foods such as bee products are often of interest in preclinical and clinical research to explore their possible beneficial effects. The National Institute of Health's Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) contains over 165,000 labels of dietary supplements marketed in the United States of America (US), including declarations on labels for many of these ingredients, including those in honeybee products which have been used in foods and traditional medicines for centuries worldwide and are now also appearing in dietary supplements. Methods: This article presents a use case for honeybee products that describes and tests the utility of the DSLD and other databases available in the US as research tools for identifying and quantifying the prevalence of such ingredients.. It focuses on the limitations to the information on product composition in these databases and describes how to code the ingredients using the LanguaL™ or FoodEx2 description and classification systems and the strengths and limitations of information on honeybee product ingredients, including propolis, bee pollen, royal jelly, beeswax, and bee venom. Results and Conclusions: Codes for the ingredients are provided for identifying their presence in LanguaL™ or FoodEx2 ontologies used in Europe and elsewhere. The prevalence of dietary supplement products containing these ingredients in DSLD and on the US market is low compared to some other products and ingredients. Unfortunately label declarations in DSLD do not provide quantitative information and so the data can be used only to screen for their presence, but cannot be used for quantitative exposure estimates by researchers and regulators .

Development of a Database of LanguaLTM and FoodEx2 Codes of 50 Ready-to-Eat Products.

Ready-to-eat (RTE) and ready-to-heat (RTH) dishes are food items that help save time, physical energy, and mental effort in all food-related activities. Convenience of use, variability of supply, and adaptability to different consumption occasions have led to an increase of acceptance among consumers through the years. Specialized databases can help in this context, where food composition databases can provide information and data to create sustainable nutritional models by reducing the now growing number of chronic diseases. This paper aims at developing a database of LanguaLTM and FoodEx2 codes of 50 food preparations and ready-to-eat dishes designed for consumption outside the home. LanguaLTM, as well as FoodEx2, are classification and description systems for indexing, in the sense of a systematic description, of foods based on a hierarchical model (parent-child relationship), thus facilitating the international exchange of data on food composition, consumption, assessing chronic and/or acute exposure to a certain agent, and not least the assessment of nutrient intake. The database, here presented, consists of the codes of fifty ready-to-eat products present on the market in Italy, obtained by using the two mostly commonly used and widely recognized coding systems: LanguaLTM and FoodEx2. This database represents a tool and a guideline for other compilers and users to apply coding systems to ready-to-eat products. Moreover, it can be represented a resource for several applications, such as nutritional cards, nutritional facts, food labels, or booklet and brochures for promotion of food products, to be used at health and food nutrition interface, useful for consumers, dieticians, and food producers.

The first harmonised total diet study in Portugal: Nitrate occurrence and exposure assessment.

A harmonised TDS methodology was used to assess the Portuguese population's nitrate baseline dietary exposure and the risk of exceeding the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI). Nitrate occurrence in 164 TDS samples pooled based on 20 FoodEx2 groups, representative of 18 to 75 years old population diet, was determined using UV-HPLC. The 'vegetables' group had the highest mean nitrate concentration (353 mg/kg), followed by 'starchy roots' (62 mg/kg), 'composite dishes' (53 mg/kg) and 'fruits' (46 mg/kg). Lettuce contained the most nitrates (1729 mg/kg). The estimated mean nitrate exposure of 1.17 mg/kg bw/day, with 3.18% of individuals exceeding the ADI, was assessed on a semi-probabilistic approach using the MCRA software. Lettuce (28%) contributed most to nitrate exposure followed by vegetable soup (13%). Processed meat contribution to exposure was 0.86% and 2.44% (overall population and consumers only). At population level the nitrate estimated exposure (mean and 95th percentile) revealed no reason for concern.

European Food Safety Authority open access tools to estimate dietary exposure to food chemicals.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has developed a suite of open access tools to estimate dietary exposure to food-borne chemical hazards. The tools are tailored to several regulatory domains within EFSA's remit (e.g. food and feed additives, pesticide residues, contaminants and food enzymes) and are intended for use by EFSA experts, industry applicants of regulatory product dossiers, researchers or any stakeholder with an interest in estimating dietary exposure using European food consumption data. The majority of the tools are based on FoodEx2, EFSA's food classification and description system as well as the EFSA Comprehensive European food consumption database. This paper provides an overview of these open access tools, the regulatory framework in which they were developed as well as data sources used.

FoodEx2vec: New foods' representation for advanced food data analysis.

In food and toxicology science, a huge amount of research and other data has been collected. To enable its full utilization, advanced statistical and computer methods are required. All data is related to food items, but additionally include different kinds of information. Nowadays the consumption of avocado has increased. To understand the full impact of this increased consumption on public health and the environment, different data related to avocado need to be considered. In this paper, we present an approach for representing foods in the form of vectors of continuous numbers (food embeddings) as an alternative solution to manual indexing. The utility of representing food data as a vector of continuous numbers was evaluated and demonstrated in four tasks: i) automated determination of different food groups, ii) automated detection of the food class for each food concept (raw, derivative or composite), iii) identification of most similar food concepts for a given food concept, and iv) qualitative evaluation by a food expert. The experimental results showed that these kind of vector representations outperform the traditional representational methods used for food data analysis, and thus they present a step forward to more advanced food data analysis used for discovering new knowledge.

Development of Dietary Supplement Label Database in Italy: Focus of FoodEx2 Coding.

The sector of food supplements is certainly varied and growing: an ever wider offer of new products is launched on the market every year. This is reflected in new reorganization of drug companies and new marketing strategies, in the adoption of new production technologies with resulting changes in dietary supplements regulation. In this context, information on composition reported in labels of selected dietary supplements was collected and updated for the development of a Dietary Supplement Label Database according to products' availability on the Italian market and also including items consumed in the last Italian Dietary Survey. For each item, a code was assigned following the food classification and description system FoodEx2, revision 2. A total of 558 products have been entered into the database at present, trying to give a uniform image and representation of the major classes of food supplements, and 82 descriptors have been compiled. Various suggestions on how the number of FoodEx2 system descriptors could be expanded were noted during the compilation of the database and the coding procedure, which are presented in this article. Limits encountered in compiling the database are represented by the changes in the formulation of products on the market and therefore by the need for a constant database update. The database here presented can be a useful tool in clinical trials, dietary plans, and pharmacological programs.

Animal dietary exposure: overview of current approaches used at EFSA.

At EFSA, animal dietary exposure estimates are undertaken by several Panels/Units to assess the risk of feed contaminants, pesticide residues, genetically modified feed and feed additives. Guidance documents describing methodologies for animal dietary exposure assessment are available both at EFSA and international levels. Although appropriate within pertinent regulatory frameworks, the methodologies used to assess animal dietary exposure vary across risk assessment areas. There are different approaches ranging from quick worst-case estimations to more refined methods assessing actual exposure, resulting from the use of a heterogeneous selection of animal populations and default values to estimate feed intake. Furthermore, current feed classification systems in place at international and national levels contain a large and heterogeneous number of feed materials, which may benefit from further harmonisation efforts. This technical report presents an overview of the current approaches in place at EFSA to assess the exposure to chemicals in feed. The possibility for a greater harmonisation of feed classification and terminology is also addressed by comparing the structure of the EU catalogue of feed materials and the Harmonised OECD tables of feedstuffs derived from field crops with the EFSA FoodEx2 system.

StandFood: Standardization of Foods Using a Semi-Automatic System for Classifying and Describing Foods According to FoodEx2.

The European Food Safety Authority has developed a standardized food classification and description system called FoodEx2. It uses facets to describe food properties and aspects from various perspectives, making it easier to compare food consumption data from different sources and perform more detailed data analyses. However, both food composition data and food consumption data, which need to be linked, are lacking in FoodEx2 because the process of classification and description has to be manually performed-a process that is laborious and requires good knowledge of the system and also good knowledge of food (composition, processing, marketing, etc.). In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic system for classifying and describing foods according to FoodEx2, which consists of three parts. The first involves a machine learning approach and classifies foods into four FoodEx2 categories, with two for single foods: raw (r) and derivatives (d), and two for composite foods: simple (s) and aggregated (c). The second uses a natural language processing approach and probability theory to describe foods. The third combines the result from the first and the second part by defining post-processing rules in order to improve the result for the classification part. We tested the system using a set of food items (from Slovenia) manually-coded according to FoodEx2. The new semi-automatic system obtained an accuracy of 89% for the classification part and 79% for the description part, or an overall result of 79% for the whole system.

Development of harmonised food and sample lists for total diet studies in five European countries.

A total diet study (TDS) is a public health tool for determination of population dietary exposure to chemicals across the entire diet. TDSs have been performed in several countries but the comparability of data produced is limited. Harmonisation of the TDS methodology is therefore desirable and the development of comparable TDS food lists is considered essential to achieve the consistency between countries. The aim of this study is to develop and test the feasibility of a method for establishing harmonised TDS food and sample lists in five European countries with different consumption patterns (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Iceland and Portugal). The food lists were intended to be applicable for exposure assessment of wide range of chemical substances in adults (18-64 years) and the elderly (65-74 years). Food consumption data from recent dietary surveys measured on individuals served as the basis for this work. Since the national data from these five countries were not comparable, all foods were linked to the EFSA FoodEx2 classification and description system. The selection of foods for TDS was based on the weight of food consumed and was carried out separately for each FoodEx2 level 1 food group. Individual food approach was respected as much as possible when the TDS samples were defined. TDS food lists developed with this approach represented 94.7-98.7% of the national total diet weights. The overall number of TDS samples varied from 128 in Finland to 246 in Germany. The suggested method was successfully implemented in all five countries. Mapping of data to the EFSA FoodEx2 coding system was recognised as a crucial step in harmonisation of the developed TDS food lists.