FOOD RELATED CONTAMINANTS
Mineral Oil Hydrocarbons may unintentionally contaminate food through different routes across food chains and the lifecycle of food contact materials.
Gaps in the knowledge about mineral oil hydrocarbons (MON) still exist despite the recent advances in the research field.
A workshop to identify those gaps was organized by the European Branch of the International Life Science Institute.
Some of these were identified to be:
- the lack of validated and standardized analytical methods for relevant food matrices, and
- gaps in assessing the risk for consumers’ health.
The consensus is that the lack of standardized, validated analytical methods able to assure good inter-laboratory reproducibility is the main gap underlining most of the existing difficulties to understand MOH.
In order to conduct adequate substance identification and quantification for input into risk assessment, the need for confirmatory methods that provide a detailed characterization of the unresolved complex mixtures needs to be solved.
The limited number of surveys covering a wide range of foods and enough samples to detect major sources of contamination other than packaging in paperboard also hinders reliable exposure estimation.
Decision tree to identify auxilary methods. (Adapted from Bratinova & Hoekstra, 2019)
Industry sectors represented in the workshop
- Food & Drink
- Mineral Oil/Waxes
- Testing Laboratories
- Analytical Instruments
- Food Contact Materials
- Cosmetics
- Petroleum
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To enable human risk assessment, the performance of toxicological studies on the relevant MOH mixtures and possibly their components is required.
This work was conducted in collaboration with the Packaging Materials Task Force.