Estimate of dietary exposure to sulphites using Brazilian students as a sample population.

In Brazil, there is neither a register of the use of sulphites by the food industry nor is research being undertaken on their dietary exposure to the population. The objective of the work reported here was to estimate the dietary exposure to sulphites in two different groups of high school students, a fee-paying school group and a state school group. The data were collected through a 24-hour dietary recall, which provided estimates of sulphited foods and beverages in the diet. The Maximum Permitted Level (MPL), established by the Brazilian legislation for each of the sulphited food and beverages, was used to measure the dietary exposure to this additive. On this basis none of the students could have exceeded the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) of 0.70 mg SO2/kg bw/day, with a average dietary exposure of 0.07 mg SO2/kg bw/day (p<0.001), with no significant statistical difference (p=0.643) between fee-paying and state school students. Highly exposed consumers (dietary exposure to more than 50% of the ADI, or either, 0.35 mg SO2/kg bw/day, to the maximum of 0.52 mg SO2/kg bw/dia) represented 4.5% of the researched samples and reached these levels of intake due to a consumption beyond 500 ml/day of industrialized packaged fruit juices, and, in the fee-paying school, for associating its consumption with alcoholic beverages like beer and wine.