Journal of Preventive Medicine

Description

Pregnancy, being a vulnerable period, is the time when woman are most motivated to change their diet and lifestyle. Ensuring food safety during this susceptible time of life is essential for avoiding the related risks. Although a wealth of recommendations and guidelines have been issued for pregnant women, further evidence is required regarding their effectiveness in implementing the knowledge and changing behaviour on food safety topics are needed. Surveys are often used as a research tool to investigate knowledge and awareness amongst pregnant women. Our main aim is to analyse and describe the results of an ad hoc research approach developed to characterise the main features of surveys identified in the PubMed database. The three major food safety issues - microbiological, chemical and nutritional- were analysed. We identified eight main key features to provide a summary of the evidence with a transparent and reproducible methodology. Our results help summarise the knowledge on the features of for pregnant women, by focusing on high-income countries over the last five years. We observed a high level of heterogeneity and methodological variability in food safety surveys. This is a novel approach that could be used to analyse surveys utilising a robust methodology. The outcomes are useful for guiding new survey design methodology and/or the modification existing surveys. Our findings could help to fill knowledge gaps by improving the use of innovative strategies for recommendations and guidelines on food safety for pregnant women. Non-high-income countries deserve separate and more comprehensive consideration.

Health Threats

As unsafe food production poses global health threats, especially in developing countries, food safety detection always significantly impacts all fields of the food industry, such as production, processing, transportation, storage, and consumption. Many classical food safety detecting methods have been widely used to provide accurate, sensitive, and reliable analytical characteristics, while they rely on clean laboratories, bulky setups, trained personnel, and long-time detection. Because of those conditions, they are not suitable for on-site food safety detecting applications. To solve this problem, various food safety detecting approaches relying on fieldportable devices and field-operable techniques have been designed and successfully used, indicating that they are potentially ideal solutions for on-site applications. This review summarizes the progress on on-site food safety detecting approaches and applications for various risk factors, including bacteria, parasites, viruses, toxins, pesticide and veterinary drug residues, illegal food additives, restricted food ingredients, and heavy metals. It outlines recent advances in field-portable devices and field-operable techniques that provide conditions for on-site food safety detection. Recommended on-site food safety detecting approaches for different food safety risk factors are comprehensively suggested considering detecting feasibility, accuracy, and speed. These approaches reveal an attractive and promising route for future practical food safety detecting applications with the merits of portable devices, simple userfriendly operation, and rapid on-site detection. This review further addresses current challenges, and finally discusses future trends and strategies that could be employed in on-site food safety detection. Frequently occurrence of food safety incidents has induced global concern over food safety. To ensure food quality and safety, an increasing number of rapid and sensitive analytical methods have been developed for analysis of all kinds of food composition and contaminants. As one of the highprofile analytical techniques, Raman spectroscopy has been widely applied in food analysis with simple, rapid, sensitive, and nondestructive detection performance. Research on Raman techniques is a direction of great interest to many fields, especially in food safety. Hence, it is crucial to gain insight into recent advances on the use of Raman-based techniques in food safety applications. In this review, we introduce Raman techniques from normal Raman spectroscopy to developed ones (e.g., surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS), surface-enhanced spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SESORS)), in view of their history and development, principles, design, and applications. The findings also showed that health physicians, followed by social media, were the channels most frequently used to obtain information about food-related risks. Moreover, the majority believed that food safety is better in current times and willing to pay more for notably approved and safe food products (67.3%). However, the results revealed an extensive lack of awareness of how the Saudi food safety system works, and the regression indicated that only age and disease presence yielded significant results. The present findings provide invaluable platform data for food-producing companies and regulatory authorities to recognise consumer interests and perceptions of food safety as an important determinant of the attitudes of people toward health.

Food Safety Detection

In addition, future challenges and trends of these techniques are discussed regarding to food safety. Ensuring food safety continues to be one of the major global challenges. For effective food safety monitoring, fast, sensitive, portable, and efficient food safety detection strategies must be devised. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline materials that have attracted attention for use in high-performance sensors for food safety detection owing to their advantages such as high porosity, large specific surface area, adjustable structure, and easy surface functional modification. Immunoassay strategies based on antigen–antibody specific binding are one of the important means for accurate and rapid detection of trace contaminants in food. Emerging MOFs and their composites with excellent properties are being synthesized, providing new ideas for immunoassays. This article summarizes the synthesis strategies of MOFs and MOF-based composites and their applications in the immunoassays of food contaminants. The challenges and prospects of the preparation and immunoassay applications of MOF-based composites are also presented. The findings of this study will contribute to the development and application of novel MOF-based composites with excellent properties and provide insights into advanced and efficient strategies for developing immunoassays. We innovatively investigate public defensive behavior in response to food safety risks. Using novel transaction-level data from a large insurance company in China, we empirically find a significant positive correlation between food safety risks and health insurance purchases. The causality is identified by 2SLS regressions with instrumental variables and a quasi-natural experiment. Further analysis shows that the insurance effect is a result of residents’ irrational overreaction and defensive psychology towards food safety risks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study conducted in Saudi Arabia to investigate public interest, risk perceptions, and awareness of food safety and its association with population characteristics among a large-scale, randomly selected sample. Of the 1000 participants, almost half (43.9%) indicated their reliance on food safety when making any food-related decisions. When assessing the relationship between food-related decisions and potential predictor variables, only age and educational level yielded significant results. The findings also provide better insights into the extent to which the population is aware of the Saudi food safety system as well as the credibility of the sources that consumers use to find information about food safety.