BRAFO Tiered Approach for Benefit Risk Assessment of Foods

01/06/2012

Hoekstra J, Hart A, Boobis A, Claupein E, Cockburn A, Hunt A, Knudsen I, Richardson D, Schilter B, Schütte K, Torgerson PR

Food and Chemical Toxicology. 2012;50(Suppl 4):S684-S698

BRAFO stands for Benefit–Risk Analysis for Foods. This European Commission funded project aimed at developing a framework that allows quantitative comparison of human health risks and benefits of foods and food compounds based on a common scale of measurement. A methodology group brought together methodologies from several disciplines relevant to the evaluation of risks and benefits in food. This group reviewed and assembled the methodologies available. They produced a guidance document that describes a tiered (‘stepwise’) approach for performing a risk and benefit assessment of foods.

The process starts with pre-assessment and problem formulation to set the scope of the assessment. This includes defining two scenarios, the reference and an alternative that are compared in the assessment. The approach consists of four tiers. In many cases, a lower tier assessment in which risks and benefits are qualitatively evaluated may be sufficient to show a clear difference between the health impacts of the two scenarios. In other cases, increasingly sophisticated methods to integrate risks and benefits quantitatively are used at higher tiers to assess the net health impact.

The developed framework was tested over a series of three different series of case studies on: Natural Foods, Dietary Interventions and Heat Processing of Foods. The key findings, from the case studies, were used to further refine the framework.

Then, a consensus group looked at implications and experience gained during the development of the whole project for further improvement of the benefit-risk assessment methodology. Finally, it was concluded that the proposed BRAFO methodology is applicable to a range of situations and that it does help in optimising resource utilisation through early identification of those benefit-risk questions where benefit clearly outweighs risk or vice versa.

BRAFO Publications

The following publications are available for download:

For more information on the BRAFO project, please contact publications@ilsieurope.be.