Best Practices for Risk-Benefit Analysis: experience from out of food into food

Risk-benefit analysis is the comparison of the risk of a situation to its related benefits and comprises a constellation of methods, drawn from many disciplines, and addresses the question of whether a risk is acceptable. Over the past years the risk-benefit analysis in relation to foods and food ingredients has gained much attention, in Europe but also worldwide. The debate focuses mainly on how and when to conduct such analysis. So on the one hand food contains necessary and beneficial ingredients, whereas
on the other hand it can also contain potentially adverse ingredients. The issue is that the beneficial and adverse potential can be in the same food or even in the same ingredient. The approaches and policies followed and measures taken to guarantee food safety may lead to suboptimal/too low levels or absence of ingredients from the perspective of benefits. Not allowing food benefits to occur in order to guarantee food safety is a risk management decision equally well as accepting some risk in order to achieve more
benefits. Any choice is a choice.

As such, risk-benefit assessment is a new and very important issue in the area of food and nutrition. It envisages comparing both risks and benefits of foods and food ingredients in one currency, thereby allowing for a qualitative and quantitative comparison of adverse and beneficial effects. The risk-benefit assessment can then be reported into policy makers to allow them to make a risk-benefit management decision. This scientific area has only very recently been entered. This project will approach risk-benefit analysis for foods and nutrition from another (any other) perspective, rather than duplicating existing activities in order to push the area of risk benefit analysis for foods forth. Whereas, risk-benefit analysis is fully new in the food and nutrition area, there is already
established experience with risk-benefit analysis in other areas: pharmaceuticals and medicine, environment, microbiology, societal and economics, consumer perception …….

The current project proposal envisages identifying best-practices and experiences from other areas and transposing those into the food and nutrition area. As such the food and nutrition area could profit from established experiences in other areas. It will be a challenge to bring various disciplines together in order to profit from one another, but when finalized all may have gained and profited.
This project will combine the insights from the various disciplines. It will describe best practices in riskbenefit analysis on the basis of experience from various disciplines. The best practices will be written down in a consensus paper, which will be discussed in a wider audience at the planned integration workshop, and then finalized. The consensus paper will be written along the basic paradigm underlying all three aspects of risk-benefit analysis:

- risk-benefit assessment (technically assessing risks and benefits in an objective way)
- risk-benefit management (adding policy aspects to the choices identified)
- risk-benefit communication

 As such the project will combine best practices from out of food into the area of risk-benefit of food and nutrition.

Employee

• Helga Gunnlaugsdóttir
  Research Group Leader
  Tel.: 422 5058

Research field

• Food Safety, Environment and Genetics