Risk assessment and risk management of novel plant foods:Concepts and principles

Novel food regulation is already in force in the European Community, Australia/New Zealand and in Canada. These regulations distinguish between traditional plant foods and novel plant foods, as the novel plant foods need to go through a premarket assessment procedure. This report focus on developing a proposal for definitions and criteria for determining if a plant food is traditional or novel and a proposal for an approach for the safety assessment of such plant foods with no or limited documented history of safe consumption. The report recommend to introduce a 2-step management procedure, first to establish the novelty and secondly to define and commit resources for the safety assessment, and recommend to generate and use a worldwide net of global, regional, local and ethnobotanical positive lists for food plants to guide both the decision on novelty and the safety assessment. The report recommends using the "history of use"-concept and if the data submitted can support the claim that a product has a history of safe use, the approval can be straightforward. In Europe around 300 food plants deliver near 100% of human daily intake of plant food calories while nearly 7,000 other food plant species are used in other parts of the world. This report focuses on the situation when novel food items from these 7,000 plants are to enter the European or other regional market

Cucurbitacins in plant food

Poisoning due to Cucurbitaceous vegetables seems to be linked to intake of immensely bitter vegetables. The bitter and toxic compounds in these vegetables are cucurbitacins, which are well known in wild varieties of these food plants and their related species. The cultivated forms, on the other hand, have during cultivation been selected for being free of the bitter and toxic compounds. Occasionally, cultivars of cucurbitaceous food plants (e.g. squash) back-mutate and regain the ability to produce toxic amounts of cucurbitacins. This review summarises the information available on cucurbitacins in food plants of the family Cucurbitaceae, with the aim to lay down background information required to evaluate the potential risk of being intoxicated by cucurbitacins as a part of the safety assessment of cucurbitaceous food plants, and especially in relation to genetically modified Cucurbitaceous plants

Risk Assessment and Risk Management of novel Plant Foods : Concepts and Principles

Novel food regulation is already in force in the European Community, Australia/New Zealand and in Canada. These regulations distinguish between traditional plant foods and novel plant foods, as the novel plant foods need to go through a premarket assessment procedure. This report focus on developing a proposal for definitions and criteria for determining if a plant food is traditional or novel and a proposal for an approach for the safety assessment of such plant foods with no or limited documented history of safe consumption. The report recommend to introduce a 2-step management procedure, first to establish the novelty and secondly to define and commit resources for the safety assessment, and recommend to generate and use a worldwide net of global, regional, local and ethnobotanical positive lists for food plants to guide both the decision on novelty and the safety assessment. The report recommends using the "history of use"-concept and if the data submitted can support the claim that a product has a history of safe use, the approval can be straightforward. In Europe around 300 food plants deliver near 100% of human daily intake of plant food calories while nearly 7,000 other food plant species are used in other parts of the world. This report focuses on the situation when novel food items from these 7,000 plants are to enter the European or other regional market