HHRA Paper Analyzes Pesticide Dietary Risk in Individual Samples of Foods

Dr. Kimberly Yolton joins HHRA board
Dr. Yolton is a developmental psychologist and epidemiologist serving as Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her interests include exposures and experiences that may alter a child’s developmental trajectory from infancy through adolescence. She collaborates on research projects on typical child development as well as those focused on the impact of exposures to environmental toxicants, opiates and stress during early development.
Paul Hartnett, HHRA’s Executive Director
Paul Hartnett has served as HHRA’s CFO since our founding . With the departure of Russell King, Paul has now joined the board and Executive Director. We thank Russell for his service and wish him the best in his future endeavors.
Heartland Study Enrolls 1,000th Mother-Infant Pair
July 19, 2024 – In June of this year, the Heartland Study achieved a major milestone, enrolling its 1,000th mother-infant pair. Enrollment is now at 50% of goal. The objective of the Study is to help fill major gaps in our understanding of the impacts of herbicides on maternal and infant health. Currently in Phase 1, the Study is focused on evaluating associations between herbicide concentrations in body fluids and tissue samples from pregnant women and infants, and pregnancy/childbirth outcomes. Phase 2 is designed to evaluate potential associations between herbicide biomarkers and early childhood neurological development. Much appreciation for the mothers enrolled, and the entire Heartland Study Team including scientists, support staff and clinicians for this tremendous achievement, and for our funders to making this work possible. Read more about the study including peer-reviewed studies published in Chemosphere and Agrichemicals at our publications page. The investment required to conduct this study exceeds $1 million each year. You can support this important work by making a donation here.
HHRA’s 2023 Annual Report
Last year was a year of progress for the HHRA and the Heartland Study. Read about it here!
Supporting HHRA and the Heartland Study Through Donor-Advised Funds
An increasingly popular way to manage charitable giving is by donating cash, securities, or other assets into a donor-advised fund (DAF), from which you will receive an immediate tax deduction. From this, donors can recommend grants to IRS-qualified nonprofit organizations. DAFs are one of the easiest and most tax-advantageous ways to “grow” resources earmarked for future charitable giving. The HHRA is an IRS-qualified organization, and we encourage you to use your DAF, if you have one, to support our mission. You can find three simple steps to supporting our research via your DAF here. Simple and convenient, your DAF can have genuine effects on the health of mothers, babies, and future generations. Thank you!

One of the main sources of pesticide exposure is through the diet. It is critically important to understand pesticide residues in foods and how dietary risks have changed over time.

Over the last 20 years HHRA’s Executive Director Charles Benbrook has developed an analytical database that quantifies the relative risk posed by residues in the diet. Known as the Dietary Risk Index (DRI), this system was created to help researchers compare risk levels across foods and pesticides, track changes in dietary risk over time, and assess the impact of where food is grown on residues and risk levels, as well as how production systems influence residues and risks (conventional versus organic). The DRI combines the results of United States and United Kingdom pesticide residue testing programs with data on food serving sizes and each pesticide’s chronic Reference Dose or Acceptable Daily Intake. Chronic DRI values are a ratio: the amount of residue in a serving of food relative to the maximum amount allowed by regulators. DRI values are a ratio: the amount of residue in a serving of food relative to the maximum amount allowed by regulators. Data generated by the DRI helps guide HHRA’s policy and public health by highlighting which food-pesticide combinations account for the most worrisome risks in the food supply.

The DRI system initially reported aggregate values for a given food/pesticide combination. These values are derived from multiple individual samples of a food collected by regulatory agencies. For these DRI values, each individual number represents many servings of a given food. In 2022, HHRA added additional functionality the the DRI to report dietary risk in individual samples of a given food. The paper “Tracking pesticide residues and risk levels in individual samples—insights and applications,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe in July 2022, describes the methodology and data sources used to calculate these individual sample DRI values, and highlights some of the results and what they can tell us about residue levels in the global food supply. This is the first analytical system worldwide to provide this level of insight into residues in food.

As the paper reports, “dietary risk levels are highly skewed. A large number of samples pose moderate, low, or very-low risks, and relatively few samples pose high or very-high risks.” Thus, regulators and researchers can use the DRI to pinpoint where pesticide dietary risks needs to be mitigated.

Like all of HHRA’s peer-reviewed publications, this paper is open access and available free of charge. Click here to view the full text. Access DRI data here.