Health benefits of 'grow your own' food in urban areas: implications for contaminated land risk assessment and risk management?
Health benefits of 'grow your own' food in urban areas: implications for contaminated land risk assessment and risk management?
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DOI：
10.1186/1476-069x-8-s1-s6
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发表时间：
2009-12-21
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Rigby JE
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Leake JR;Adam-Bradford A;Rigby JE
在过去的十年里，有令人信服的证据表明，水果和蔬菜的消费、体育活动以及与“绿色空间”的户外互动对健康有很大的好处——所有这些都表明，在城市地区，“自己种植”（GYO）对健康有很大的潜在好处。然而，目前的风险评估模型和风险管理战略都没有考虑到这些健康益处，尽管它们的潜力往往超过完全补偿风险。虽然城市环境受到重金属、砷、多芳烃和二恶英的污染比大多数农村农业地区更严重，但在英国城市地区，缺乏证据证明GYO对健康的不良影响。GYO食品中的污染物很少超过商业食品的法定限量，很少有人从GYO获得大部分食物。在英国，触发关闭或修复分配和花园场地的土壤污染阈值是基于预防原则的，产生的“恐慌”可能对公众健康产生负面影响，与通过自己种植的食物接触毒素的实际健康风险不成比例。相比之下，GYO对健康的好处是与不断升级的“肥胖和懒惰”公共健康危机的直接对照，这种危机是由摄入过多饱和脂肪、新鲜水果和蔬菜摄入不足以及缺乏锻炼引起的。这些是目前最重要的可预防的疾病和死亡原因。因此，“自己种植”的健康和更广泛的社会效益揭示了当前风险评估方法的主要局限性，这些方法仅考虑风险，无法预测特定地点的GYO总体上对人类健康是否会产生积极、消极或没有净影响。这突出了对新一代风险评估工具的更普遍需求，这些工具还可以预测对健康的总体后果，以便在我们日益厌恶风险的文化中更有效地指导风险管理。
Compelling evidence of major health benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption, physical activity, and outdoor interaction with 'greenspace' have emerged in the past decade - all of which combine to give major potential health benefits from 'grow-your-own' (GYO) in urban areas. However, neither current risk assessment models nor risk management strategies for GYO in allotments and gardens give any consideration to these health benefits, despite their potential often to more than fully compensate the risks. Although urban environments are more contaminated by heavy metals, arsenic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins than most rural agricultural areas, evidence is lacking for adverse health outcomes of GYO in UK urban areas. Rarely do pollutants in GYO food exceed statutory limits set for commercial food, and few people obtain the majority of their food from GYO. In the UK, soil contamination thresholds triggering closure or remediation of allotment and garden sites are based on precautionary principles, generating 'scares' that may negatively impact public health disproportionately to the actual health risks of exposure to toxins through own-grown food. By contrast, the health benefits of GYO are a direct counterpoint to the escalating public health crisis of 'obesity and sloth' caused by eating an excess of saturated fats, inadequate consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables combined with a lack of exercise. These are now amongst the most important preventable causes of illness and death. The health and wider societal benefits of 'grow-your-own' thus reveal a major limitation in current risk assessment methodologies which, in only considering risks, are unable to predict whether GYO on particular sites will, overall, have positive, negative, or no net effects on human health. This highlights a more general need for a new generation of risk assessment tools that also predict overall consequences for health to more effectively guide risk management in our increasingly risk-averse culture.