Bernhard Fritz
Moderator: Hans-Uwe von Grabowski
Nothing is closer to people’s hearts than their own health. The effects of substances that we deliberately or unintentionally consume have therefore been studied from an early stage. For 500 years, the Paracelsus principle of the concentration dependence of toxic substances served as a guiding principle for all those dedicated to toxicology.
With increasingly high-resolution analytical methods in the second half of the 20th century, ever smaller concentrations could be detected in (foreign) substances that enter the human body with food. As a result, the transfer of substances from food contact materials (or from the “environment” in general) into food became increasingly relevant and was reflected in legislation. Since the 1980s, the EU Member States have progressively established a legal framework that, to this day, based on scientific data, is globally (!) pioneering for the assessment of food contact materials.
The lecture covers the (EU) legal framework for substances/materials/articles intended for food contact and the physical and chemical principles underlying it.
