Dietary patterns among the Metro Atlanta Cohort: Implications for population-based longitudinal dietary pesticide exposure and risk assessment

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Characterizing dietary consumption patterns is critical to dietary pesticide exposure assessment. We compared consumption patterns between adults (age 18-60) in the Metro Atlanta Cohort (MAC), a longitudinal study of pesticide exposure among Atlanta residents, and US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) adults. We focused on foods commonly eaten by US adults and foods likely to contain certain pesticide residues. MAC participants provided consumption data for 6 days per month for 1 year using a web-based data collection tool. We defined "percent eaters" as the percent of participants who reported eating a particular food in 24 h. We computed the NHANES weighted percent eaters and 95% confidence limits (CLs) using the 24-h dietary recall data. We calculated the MAC percent eaters for each sampling day and the percent of days this number fell below, within, or above the NHANES 95% CLs. We also re-sampled the MAC percent eaters across sampling days to find whether the resulting distribution resembled the NHANES estimate, and used the Kruskal-Wallis test to evaluate whether season affected the number of MAC eaters of a particular food on a given sampling day. In general, across all sampling days, a greater proportion of MAC participants reported eating banana, broccoli, cream, grapes, lettuce, onion, peach, pear, peas, strawberries, string beans, and tomatoes than the national estimate, whereas the proportion of apple, spinach, ketchup and white bread/roll eaters was similar, and the proportion of milk drinkers was lower. Season predicted the number of MAC peach and strawberry eaters but not other foods. The data show how a higher proportion of Atlanta adults may eat certain foods (e.g., peaches in summer or strawberries in spring) than the national average depending on season or other factors. An exposure assessment that ignored this difference could underestimate dietary pesticide intakes.