Designer food, definition

The term acceptable is used widely to describe safe levels of intake and is apphed for chemicals to be used in food production such as, e.g., food additives, pesticides, and veterinary dmgs. The term tolerable is applied for chemicals unavoidably present in a media such as contaminants in, e.g., drinking water and food. The term PTWI (Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake) is generally used for contaminants that may accumulate in the body, and the weekly designation is used to stress the importance of limiting intake over a period of time for such substances. The tolerable intake is similar in definition and intent to terms such as Reference Dose and Reference Concentration (RfD/RfC), which are widely used by, e.g., the US-EPA. For some substances, notably pesticides, the ARID (Acute Reference Dose), is also established, often from shorter-term studies than those that would support the ADI. The ARfD is defined as the amount of a substance in food that can be consumed in the course of a day or at a single meal with no adverse effects. 

Utility tests. By definition, these are actual food formulations copying accepted food preparations. As mentioned above, when Model Tests are designed, the range of products undergoing the test should be wide enough to include some failures. In some cases, a Utility Test is employed that substitutes objective evaluation systems for sensory ones. This reduces the time of the test and its cost. However, only those objective tests previously found to be well correlated with sensory tests should be employed. Eventually a sensory test has to be performed. No food product should be marketed without a final utility test employing subjective evaluations. 

Previous studies have not been able to provide definitive evidence for differences between these two food production systems in terms of effect on human health and this conclusion suggests that the designs of these studies were possibly inadequate to provide such evidence, and/or were not targeted to those aspects where differences are most likely. 

Overall, these studies show that despite the failure of most studies to show definitive direct effects on health, production methods probably affect food quality to the extent that they have a significant impact on health. These studies show that there is now a good basis for designing studies that can elucidate which production factors are important in this regard, and that the next step is to define and test these factors. 

In our attempt to understand the different designations of meat, we discovered the following extremely helpful definitions and meat certification guide written by the Chefs Collaborative (an organization of food-community members who promote sustainable cuisine and sing the praises of local, seasonal, and artisanal cooking—www.chefscollaborative.org). 

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE METHOD For the definition of the lowest dose, exposure data from animal pharmacological effect models and from single dose studies in man were used. In addition, information from a food screen and the elimination half-life were applied for the design of the study. The assumptions made were a) moderate effect of a high-fat high-calorie breakfast, thus provide a standard continental breakfast on each dosing day and b) elimination half-life of almost 24 h lets one expect that steady state is reached after 5 days of once daily dosing. To confirm the latter expectation, pre-dose and 12 h... 

While method transfer, discussed earlier in this chapter, refers to the process of implementing a newly developed method in a designated laboratory, the term calibration transfer is used in several contexts. One context, in fact, is similar to the usual definition of method transfer. A question that arises when NIR equations are concerned is Can a second instrument, using the same equation, give predictions comparable with the instrument on which the equation was developed Nonpharmaceutical applications (i.e., agriculture, textiles, process foods, and tobacco) are routinely transferred between instruments. The only difference between those applications and the pharmaceutical applications that the reader is con-... 

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