Food Safety & Nutrition
Challenge
Food is integral to our lives, not only as our source of nutrition but as a cultural centerpiece. The intersection of food safety, nutritional benefits, and risks from foods are essential to our society. Identifying science-based effective strategies to control foodborne illnesses requires sound analyses—and so does creating guidance and policies to promote health through nutrition, especially through readily available and sustainable foods.
Our dedicated team of PhDs works with government regulators, research institutions, private industry, and clinical practitioners to help organizations minimize foodborne illnesses and deliver nutritional guidance.
Solution
We develop food safety risk assessments using state of the art methods that combine traditional probabilistic modeling with emerging technologies such as OMICS and machine learning. As an unbiased third-party organization, we deliver specialized services faster than other resources such as academic institutions. We also have access to data sources not available to other entities and can be trusted to maintain data anonymity.
In the area of nutrition, we are experts at crafting a nuanced approach required to create projections and pinpoint the sustainability of suggested changes. Our risk assessment-based approach brings fresh perspective to the uncertain world of nutrition and population health.
Service Areas
QMRA is a modeling approach that answers questions about interventions, such as how to effectively reduce pathogens in food, prevent outbreaks, and more. Data quality challenges make building these quantitative models especially tricky. We work closely with our stakeholders to make sure we are addressing the right questions and provide estimates including uncertainty and variability, and the impact of alternative mitigation scenarios. Our models are data informed, ensuring that recommendations for intervention are robust.
Relationships between food, human health, and sustainability are increasingly on the forefront of nutritional science and education. However, estimates of disease burden and the unique challenges of studying long-term diet and its effect on health require specialized modeling techniques that acknowledge the nuances and uncertainties tying diets with health. Our expertise in epidemiological models, dose-response analysis, and exposure assessment give us the ability to apply a fresh perspective based on risk analysis to continuing questions on the composition of a healthy diet, especially using data with large uncertainties.
Just as with microbial contamination of foods, chemical and radiological residues can be a source of risk, especially for chronic disease. We quantify the short- and long-term risk from those hazards, and the links between them and health outcomes such as cancer, metabolic disease, and hormonal disease. Whether you are looking for help modeling a foodborne exposure, setting limits in a food product, or other questions of dietary exposure and risk, our expertise in these methods can help you with accurate estimates and quantifiable uncertainty.
Over- and misuse of antibiotics have contributed to the emergence of resistant bacteria which can infect humans and animals. Efforts focus on reducing transmission of resistant pathogens to humans via foodborne illness, by decreasing antibiotic use in animals, but the links between animal use and human illnesses are complicated and uncertain. Complex models that represent these trade-offs, uncertainties, and dynamics are needed to support the establishment of effective policies.
The wealth of information pertaining to nutrition and food safety can be overwhelming and conflicting. Our team can help bring clarity with our expertise in systematic reviews of literature, targeted third-party independent reviews, and methods for data synthesis such as meta-analysis.
Case Studies
Training - Food Safety for FSA
Modeling health impacts of diets: a risk analyst's perspective
