Case Study: University College Dublin

The Human Nutrition Research Unit in University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, have collaborated closely with the CREMe Team in order to estimate exposure to foods and chemicals (such as additives, pesticides, and nutrients) using the CREMe software. The benefits of using CREMe compared to other exposure tools include the speed at which CREMe computes its analysis, its capability to handle huge databases, and very importantly, its inherent flexibility for the user. CREMe also has an excellent user-friendly food grouping section, which allows foods to be grouped in which ever manner is required for the assessment, searching on both food data and on recipe databases.

Collaboration and Novel Foods

As CREMe is an online tool, this allows us to collaborate closely with other groups we work with worldwide. Recently, we have used the CREMe software as part of an EU 6th Framework project entitled 'Noforisk' (www.noforisk.org). The aim of this project was to develop and validate scientific methodologies for the quantitative risk assessment of second generation novel foods. UCD, together with INRAN (Italian National Research Institute for Food & Nutrition) and with TCHPC formed a work package specifically designed to estimate human exposure to target novel foods using CREMe Food Safety.

As part of our work on this project, we used CREMe Food Safety to enable us estimate exposure to both naturally occurring phytosterols and to phytosterols from enriched sources. The food grouping, market share and brand loyalty sections in CREMe were central to this task, allowing us to estimate exposure from all possible sources in the Irish diet. We also used CREMe to estimate exposure to phytic acid from dietary sources. As phytic acid binds with divalent minerals in the gut, a specific model was developed in CREMe to allow us to estimate exposure to phytic acid. Dependent on the initial phytic acid concentration, exposure to iron, calcium and zinc concentrations were also calculated simultaneously.

We found the CREMe team very friendly and efficient to work with, and they were a great support to us in all our data queries and provided us with in-depth training on using the software. The extensive functionality and flexibility of the CREMe software tool ensures that we will continue using it and work closely with CREMe Software in our future exposure assessments.

Aine Hearty, University College Dublin