Advances in assessing ingredient safety.

The safety of food ingredients will be assessed in the 21st century by mixture of traditional methods, such as the "safe" dose concept, which is thought to be an accurate but imprecise estimation of dose below the population threshold for adverse effect, and contemporary methods, such as the Benchmark Dose (BMD), Chemical Specific Adjustment Factors (CSAF), physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models, and biologically-informed dose response modeling. New research on the horizon related to toxicology 21 may also improve these risk assessment methods, or suggest new ones. These traditional, contemporary and new methods and research will be briefly described.