efsa-opinion-chromium-food-drinking-water

Chromium in food and drinking water
be said as to Cr(VI) in food, although the concentrations of reductants may be expected to be higher
than in beverages, a condition that might shorten the life of Cr(VI) species, if present, especially if
food is cooked.
The CONTAM Panel noted that there is a lack of data on the presence of Cr(VI) in food, and decided
to consider all the reported analytical results in food as Cr(III). This assumption is based on the
outcome of the recent speciation work by Kovacs et al. (2007) and Novotnik et al. (2013), the fact that
food is by-and-large a reducing medium that would likely determine Cr(VI) to be lowered to Cr(III),
and that oxidation of Cr(III) to Cr(VI) would not be favoured in such a medium, In conclusion, it can
be considered that all the chromium ingested via food is in the trivalent form, in contrast to drinking
water where chromium may easily be present in the hexavalent state, not only due to anthropogenic
contamination events, but also because water treatment facilities use strong oxidants to make water
potable (Section 1.2).
Finally, it should be noted that the published data on total chromium in foods and on total chromium
and Cr(VI) in waters are in the same range as those reported to EFSA and supports the findings and
evaluation reported below in Section 4.2.
4.2. Current occurrence results
4.2.1. Data collection summary
The Dietary and Chemical Monitoring (DCM) unit published a call for available data on nickel and
chromium (trivalent and hexavalent) levels in food and drinking water 15 . European national food
authorities and similar bodies, research institutions, academia, food and feed business operators and
any other stakeholders were invited to submit analytical data. The data submission to EFSA followed
the requirements of the EFSA Guidance on Standard Sample Description for Food and Feed (EFSA,
2010a).
By the end of February 2013 and before applying any data quality criteria, 81 247 analytical results on
chromium were available in the EFSA database. A total of 53 828 results were reported as chromium,
27 325 as total chromium, four as chromium and derivatives and two as Cr(III). Despite the specific
request for Cr(VI), only 88 analytical results were received on this chromium species, all in bottled
water. Out of the 81 247 available analytical results, a total of 27 138 were for food, 52 735 for
drinking water, 1374 for feed.
Almost 80 % of the samples were collected in Germany. After Germany, Cyprus, Slovakia and Ireland
were the countries where the highest numbers of samples were collected. Data reported covered all
years from 2000 to 2012, with the analytical data well distributed over the different years.
In order to guarantee an appropriate quality of the data used in the exposure assessment the initial
dataset was carefully evaluated applying several data cleaning and validation steps (e.g. exclusion of
duplicates and samples without complete information).
4.2.2. Data collection on food, drinking water and unprocessed grains of unknown end-use
All samples were classified according to the FoodEx classification system (EFSA, 2011a). FoodEx is a
food classification system developed by the DCM Unit in 2009 with the objective of simplifying the
linkage between occurrence and food consumption data when assessing the exposure to hazardous
substances. It contains 20 main food groups (first level), which are further divided into subgroups
having 140 items at the second level, 1261 items at the third level and reaching about 1800 endpoints
(food names or generic food names) at the fourth level. Although drinking water is considered as food
in the FoodEx classification system (EFSA, 2011a), in this Scientific Opinion drinking water is dealt
with independently from the other food categories.
15 Available online at: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/dataclosed/call/120426.htm
EFSA Journal 2014;12(3):3595 36