FDA Total Diet Study: Dietary Intakes of Lead and Other Chemicals

The history of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Total Diet Study (TDS) is described, together with some details on how it currently functions to monitor levels of lead and other chemicals in the US diet. Along with the history and structure of the TDS, a brief description of our recent effort to combine TDS lead data with data from the USDA food consumption database in a user-friendly report-generating computer program will be presented. This system will help us to produce lead exposure updates almost immediately when new analytical results are added to the TDS database.