抄録
Quantifying the daily intake of food additives is essential for advancing administrative measures to ensure food safety; this data can be used to estimate and better understand the amount of food additives consumed in our daily diets. However, this requires continuous monitoring of food intake because the amount and type of food additives vary with changes in dietary habits. The primary surveys currently used in Japan to estimate food additive intake are categorized into surveys that are used for screening estimation methods, such as production volume surveys of food additives, and surveys that are applied for deterministic exposure estimation methods. This review focuses on the latter, specifically food additive intake surveys using the market basket (MB) method and estimation of food additive intake based on their results, focusing on the implementation and results of the surveys conducted from 2000 to 2023. The surveys were conducted multiple times in approximately four-year cycles, including three-year surveys targeting adults (≧20 years) that change the target food additives each year and one-year surveys targeting children (age 1–6 years). Food additive intake was analyzed and estimated from the survey results, namely the survey targeting children for the estimation in the age group of 1–6 years and the survey targeting adults (≧20 years) for the estimation in all other age groups (7–14 years, 15–19 years, ≧20 years, and ≧1 year). In addition, the role of the MB method in food additive regulation is also discussed. Taken together, this review shows that the MB method survey of food additive intake is a beneficial tool for ensuring food safety in Japan.
