Chemical contaminants

Chemical contamination of the environment, including food, is most often an unwanted side-effect of industrial development and human population growth.  

The research at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark on environmental contaminants aims to explore the large number of potential problematic chemical compounds that could be harmful to humans, and the implications for a safe food supply.

The chemical compounds include several groups of substances. One group is the so-called persistent organic pollutants – compounds that are very resistant to degradation in nature. To this group belong organochlorine pesticides, dioxins, PCBs, brominated flame retardants and perfluorinated compounds.

Another group is many metals for example arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead and tin and their chemical speciation e.g. inorganic arsenic, methylmercury and organotin compounds.

Risk assessments of the human exposure to environmental contaminants in food are estimated by National Food Institute on the basis of food intake calculations coupled with data for the occurrence of environmental contaminants in various foodstuffs. The sources of the contaminants are assessed, and for selected contaminants, possible mitigation prospects are investigated. 

An important part of the work is the development of analytical methodologies for appropriate compounds. The laboratory at the National Food Institute is equipped with up-to-date instrumentation for the analysis of chemical contaminants.

Collaborations

Danish Veterinary and Food Administration
Danish Environmental Protection Agency
Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
NIFES - National Institute for Nutrition and Seafood Research, Norway
RIKILT – Institute of Food Safety, The Netherlands 
JRC-IRMM - Institute of Reference Materials and Measurements, Belgium

More information

Hear Professor Anne Marie Vinggaard from the National Food Institute explain how the latest knowledge on the harmful effect of chemicals will lead to a paradigm shift in the risk assessment of chemicals (video).

The European Food Safety Authority, EFSA, has made three short videos about chemical contaminants.

  1. See why chemical contaminants are present in foods and how experts assess the overall health effect of both harmful and beneficial substances in certain foods which may contain chemical contaminants (video). 
  2. See how experts set the acceptable limit for how much of a chemical – both naturally occurring and manmade – is allowed to be present in foods (video).
  3. See how genotoxic substances can harm people’s DNA and how science is used to keep these substances out of our food (video).

Also check out this infographic from EFSA which shows the types of chemical contaminants that are present in foods. The infographic also gives an overview of what is done in Europe to collect more comparable data about the level of chemical contaminants in foods in the individual countries. This data is used to better protect European consumers.

Research groups

Contact

Gitte Alsing Pedersen

Gitte Alsing Pedersen Senior Adviser (former employee) Phone: +45 35887473

Anne Marie Vinggaard

Anne Marie Vinggaard Professor Phone: +45 35887549

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