Precautionary allergen labelling: perspectives from key stakeholder groups.

Precautionary allergen labelling (PAL) was introduced by the food industry to help manage and communicate the possibility of reaction from the unintended presence of allergens in foods. However, in its current form, PAL is counterproductive for consumers with food allergies. This review aims to summarize the perspectives of all the key stakeholders (including clinicians, patients, food industry and regulators), with the aim of defining common health protection and risk minimization goals. The lack of agreed reference doses has resulted in inconsistent application of PAL by the food industry and in levels of contamination that prompt withdrawal action by enforcement officers. So there is a poor relationship between the presence or absence of PAL and actual reaction risk. This has led to a loss of trust in PAL, reducing the ability of consumers with food allergies to make informed choices. The result has been reduced avoidance, reduced quality of life and increased risk-taking by consumers who often ignore PAL. All contributing stakeholders agree that PAL must reflect actual risk. PAL should be transparent and consistent with rules underpinning decision-making process being communicated clearly to all stakeholders. The use of PAL should indicate the possible, unintended presence of an allergen in a consumed portion of a food product at or above any proposed action level. This will require combined work by all stakeholders to ensure everyone understands the approach and its limitations. Consumers with food allergy then need to be educated to undertake individualized risk assessments in relation to any PAL present.

ePlantLIBRA: A composition and biological activity database for bioactive compounds in plant food supplements.

The newly developed ePlantLIBRA database is a comprehensive and searchable database, with up-to-date coherent and validated scientific information on plant food supplement (PFS) bioactive compounds, with putative health benefits as well as adverse effects, and contaminants and residues. It is the only web-based database available compiling peer reviewed publications and case studies on PFS. A user-friendly, efficient and flexible interface has been developed for searching, extracting, and exporting the data, including links to the original references. Data from over 570 publications have been quality evaluated and entered covering 70 PFS or their botanical ingredients.

EURRECA nutritional planning and dietary assessment software tool: NutPlan.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: 'NutPlan' is developed within the EURRECA Network of Excellence (EURopean micronutrient RECommendations Aligned (http://www.eurreca.org). It is a user-friendly software programme with multiple functions: individual and group nutrition planning, recipe calculation, creating food labels, diet planning and nutrient intake assessment. This paper describes the newly developed software and its features. SUBJECTS/METHODS: 'NutPlan' contains the following databases: foods, dish recipes, meals, menus, average menus and glossary. These databases enable diet planning and diet analysis by comparing foods, dishes, meals or menus with currently available nutritional recommendations accessible by a link to EURRECA tool Nutri-RecQuest to meet individual/group nutritional needs.The software is upgraded by inserting new items (for example, foods, dishes, meals) and for a connection to other software programmes, thus allowing more advanced calculations to be completed. CONCLUSION: 'NutPlan' might be the software of choice for individual and group diet planning. It is aimed particularly at Eastern European and West Balkan countries, which currently lack dietary software. It is envisaged for use by small and medium enterprises in the food industry, as well as by health professionals, researchers and policy makers, and can be recommended for educational purposes. Given its characteristics of being upgraded to include new country-specific food data/database, it can be recognized as an important tool in nutritional capacity development in the Central Eastern European and other regions.

EURRECA: development of tools to improve the alignment of micronutrient recommendations.

Approaches through which reference values for micronutrients are derived, as well as the reference values themselves, vary considerably across countries. Harmonisation is needed to improve nutrition policy and public health strategies. The EURRECA (EURopean micronutrient RECommendations Aligned, http://www.eurreca.org) Network of Excellence is developing generic tools for systematically establishing and updating micronutrient reference values or recommendations. Different types of instruments (including best practice guidelines, interlinked web pages, online databases and decision trees) have been identified. The first set of instruments is for training purposes and includes mainly interactive digital learning materials. The second set of instruments comprises collection and interlinkage of diverse information sources that have widely varying contents and purposes. In general, these sources are collections of existing information. The purpose of the majority of these information sources is to provide guidance on best practice for use in a wider scientific community or for users and stakeholders of reference values. The third set of instruments includes decision trees and frameworks. The purpose of these tools is to guide non-scientists in decision making based on scientific evidence. This platform of instruments will, in particular in Central and Eastern European countries, contribute to future capacity-building development in nutrition. The use of these tools by the scientific community, the European Food Safety Authority, bodies responsible for setting national nutrient requirements and others should ultimately help to align nutrient-based recommendations across Europe. Therefore, EURRECA can contribute towards nutrition policy development and public health strategies.

Nutri-RecQuest: a web-based search engine on current micronutrient recommendations.

BACKGROUND: The EURRECA (EURopean micronutrient RECommendations Aligned) Network of Excellence collated current micronutrient recommendations. A user-friendly tool, Nutri-RecQuest, was developed to allow access to the collated data and to create a database source for use in other nutritional software tools. METHODS: Recommendations, that is, intakes of micronutrients sufficient to meet the requirements of the majority of healthy individuals of that population, from 37 European countries/organizations and eight key non-European countries/regions comprising 29 micronutrients were entered into a database. General information on the source of the recommendations, as well scientific background information, was added. RESULTS: A user-friendly web-based interface was developed to provide efficient search, comparison, display, print and export functions. CONCLUSION: Easy access to existing recommendations through the web-based tool may be valuable for bodies responsible for setting recommendations, as well as for users of recommendations including scientists, policy makers, health professionals and industry. Adding related dietary reference values such as average nutrient requirements and upper limits may extend the utility of the tool.

DNA fingerprinting data and the analysis of population genetic structure by comparing band-sharing patterns.

Genetic isolation among populations can be effectively investigated by multilocus DNA fingerprinting. If populations have diverged, it is expected that the mean proportion of bands shared by individuals from the same population, Bw, exceeds the corresponding mean, Bb, calculated from pairs of individuals from distinct populations. A problem arises in deciding whether any difference between Bw and Bb is statistically significant. In fact, any two band-sharing data (bij), contributing to Bw or Bb, are not independent if they share a common individual (like bij and bjl). This prevents a correct application of parametric tests, such as the Student's t-test. Recently, a modification of this test has been proposed that should avoid the independence problem. Using a large number of samples of fingerprints, simulated from an appropriate 'genetic' model, under a wide range of conditions, we compared the performances of the Student's t-test, the modified t-test and five new permutation tests, where individuals, rather than bij values, are permuted. We found that: (i) the Student's t-test can be very permissive, rejecting too often the null hypothesis when true, but is correct or conservative in certain cases; (ii) the modified t-test is extremely conservative when the null hypothesis is true and very inefficient otherwise; (iii) all five permutation tests are strictly correct, provided that individuals are ordered randomly on gels; and (iv) in this case, the permutation tests are equally efficient, and are not inferior to the Student's t-test when the latter is approximately correct and provides a fair benchmark.