title: BRAFO tiered approach for Benefit-Risk Assessment of Foods.
abstract: BRAFO stands for Benefit-Risk Analysis for Foods. This European Commission funded project aims at developing a framework that allows quantitative comparison of human health risks and benefits of foods and food compounds based on a common scale of measurement. A methodology group brought together methodologies from several disciplines relevant to the evaluation of risks and benefits in food. This group reviewed and assembled the methodologies available. They produced this guidance document that describes a tiered ('stepwise') approach for performing a risk and benefit assessment of foods. This process starts with pre-assessment and problem formulation to set the scope of the assessment. This includes defining two scenarios, the reference and an alternative that are compared in the assessment. The approach consists of four tiers. In many cases, a lower tier assessment in which risks and benefits are qualitatively evaluated may be sufficient to show a clear difference between the health impacts of the two scenarios. In other cases, increasingly sophisticated methods to integrate risks and benefits quantitatively are used at higher tiers to assess the net health impact.
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, RIVM, 3720 BA Bilthoven, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jeljer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hoekstra
authors.forename: Andy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hart
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boobis
authors.forename: Erika
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Claupein
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cockburn
authors.forename: Alistair
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hunt
authors.forename: Ib
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Knudsen
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Richardson
authors.forename: Benoît
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schilter
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Schütte
authors.forename: Paul R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Torgerson
authors.forename: Hans
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Verhagen
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Watzl
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chiodini
mesh_terms: D004032:Diet; D004305:Dose-Response Relationship, Drug; D005060:Europe; D005502:Food; D005506:Food Contamination / Q000032:analysis; D059022:Food Safety; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D018673:Nutrition Policy; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*