An Alternative Approach to Dietary Exposure Assessment

The method of dietary exposure assessment currently used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Dietary Residue Evaluation System (DRES), combines a consumption distribution derived from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 1977-1978 Nationwide Food Consumption Survey (NFCS) with a single estimate of residue level. The National Academy of Sciences'¹' recommended that EPA incorporate both the distribution of residues and the distribution of consumption into their exposure assessment methodology and proposed using a Monte Carlo approach. This paper presents an alternative method, the Joint Distributional Analysis (JDA), that combines the consumption and residue distributions, without relying on random sampling or fitting theoretical distributions like the Monte Carlo method. This method permits simultaneous analysis of the entire diet, including assessing exposure from residues in different foods.