Department of Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, ON, Canada.
Department of Health Sciences, Western University, London, ON, Canada.
PLoS One. 2024 Mar 27;19(3):e0300801. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0300801. eCollection 2024.
Food waste is a routine and increasingly growing global concern that has drawn significant attention from policymakers, climate change activists and health practitioners. Amid the plurality of discourses on food waste-health linkages, however, the health risks from food waste induced emissions have remained under explored. This lack of evidence is partly because of the lack of complete understanding of the effects of food waste emissions from household food waste on human health either directly through physiological mechanisms or indirectly through environmental exposure effects. Thus, this systematic review contributes to the literature by synthesizing available evidence to highlight gaps and offers a comprehensive baseline inventory of food waste emissions and their associated impacts on human health to support public health decision-making. Four database searches: Web of Science, OVID(Medline), EMBASE, and Scopus, were searched from inception to 3 May 2023. Pairs of reviewers screened 2189 potentially eligible studies that addressed food waste emissions from consumers and how the emissions related to human health. Following PRISMA guidelines, 26 articles were eligible for data extraction for the systematic review. Findings indicate that emissions from food waste, such as hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, and volatile organic carbons, can affect human endocrine, respiratory, nervous, and olfactory systems. The severity of the human health effects depends on the gaseous concentration, but range from mild lung irritation to cancer and death. This study recommends emission capture technologies, food diversion programs, and biogas technologies to reduce food waste emissions.
食物浪费是一个普遍存在且日益严重的全球性问题，引起了政策制定者、气候变化活动家和卫生从业者的高度关注。然而，在关于食物浪费与健康关系的多种论述中，食物浪费所产生的排放物对健康造成的风险仍未得到充分探讨。造成这种证据缺失的部分原因是，人们对家庭食物垃圾产生的食物浪费排放物对人类健康的影响缺乏全面的理解，无论是通过生理机制直接产生影响，还是通过环境暴露间接产生影响。因此，本系统评价通过综合现有证据来突出差距，为文献做出了贡献，并提供了食物浪费排放物及其对人类健康影响的综合基准清单，以支持公共卫生决策。从 2023 年 5 月 3 日开始，我们在四个数据库（Web of Science、OVID（Medline）、EMBASE 和 Scopus）中进行了搜索。由两名评审员对 2189 项可能符合条件的研究进行了筛选，这些研究涉及消费者产生的食物浪费排放物，以及这些排放物与人类健康的关系。本系统评价遵循 PRISMA 指南，有 26 篇文章符合数据提取标准。研究结果表明，食物浪费排放物（如硫化氢、氨和挥发性有机碳）会影响人类的内分泌、呼吸、神经和嗅觉系统。人类健康影响的严重程度取决于气体浓度，但范围从轻度肺部刺激到癌症和死亡。本研究建议采用排放物捕获技术、食物转移项目和沼气技术来减少食物浪费排放。
