Can food safety be “zero risk”?

With the development of society and the improvement of people's living standards, people are paying more and more attention to food safety. Some people believe that food must be absolutely safe, zero safety. Let's talk about the issue of food safety.

What is food safety? The Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China stipulates that food safety means that food is non-toxic and harmless, meets the necessary nutritional requirements, and does not cause any acute, subacute or chronic harm to human health. There are two aspects, one is nutritional requirements, and the other is acute, subacute or chronic harm. Acute harm refers to the toxic effect that occurs in the short term, up to 14 days, after the body is exposed to the harmful substance once or multiple times within 24 hours; subacute refers to the toxic effect that occurs after continuous contact for a long time, generally 3 months; chronic refers to the toxic effect that occurs after contact for half a year or even longer.

Food safety cannot be zero risk. Food safety is a relative concept. There is no absolutely safe food in the world. What can be required is only an acceptable risk level under certain social and economic conditions, that is, the relative safety of food. Food is from planting, breeding to processing to the table. Food production does not promise zero risk, but reduces the risk as low as possible to an acceptable range.

For food safety "incidents", specific analysis should be conducted. Therefore, we must understand that products that do not meet national standards will have the " risk " of causing health problems, but they are not absolutely pathogenic. The Greek doctor Paracelsus has a famous saying, "Everything is poisonous, the key is the dose." In other words, whether any substance will cause harm to our health depends on how much we eat. Even those "good" substances that seem harmless may cause poisoning if eaten too much, and vitamin A is an example. Therefore, the presence of harmful factors in food is not terrible, because they are inevitable. What we should do is to reduce the content of these harmful factors in food through various means, and reduce the health risks they bring to a very low level that we can accept.

We must look at food safety incidents rationally and explore them from a scientific perspective, and not rely on reports or feelings.

Here there is a spiral theory of food safety. What does it mean? With the development of science and technology and the deepening of understanding, the understanding of food safety has risen to a higher level, and then the understanding has risen again, promoting the development of food safety.