On May 12, 2025, at 2:00 PM, Sofia Almeida Costa, student in the Doctoral Program in Public Health, will defend her doctoral thesis titled “Dietary exposure to food contaminants and their effects on metabolic outcomes from childhood to adolescence”. The thesis was supervised by Duarte Torres and co-supervised by Carla Lopes. The event will take place at Aula Magna (FMUP).
Summary
Diet plays an essential role in human health, providing energy and crucial nutrients for the adequate growth, development and maintenance of the body’s homeostasis. However, the simple idea that energy imbalance is the leading cause of the escalating of obesity and other related comorbidities has been increasingly placed into question. Previous studies assessed the effect of exposure to unconventional risk factors on health, such as food contaminants. Acrylamide and bisphenol A (BPA) are food contaminants formed during thermal processing or migrating from food contact materials, respectively, which may negatively affect human health. Children and adolescents are a vulnerable age group due to the relatively higher food intake per body weight, and incomplete maturation of metabolic systems or key organs.
Acrylamide has the ability to form adducts with proteins and nucleic acids, causing genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, neurotoxicity, hepatoxicity, cardiovascular toxicity and reproductive toxicity. Recent studies suggested that acrylamide is a potential endocrine disruptor and may affect cardiometabolic biomarkers and puberty development through mechanisms related to oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation, adipogenesis, and hormonal disruption.
BPA may interfere with oestrogen receptors and, consequently, with the endocrine system, allowing BPA to be classified as an endocrine disruptor. Moreover, chronic BPA exposure, even at lower concentrations, may impair human health, leading to the development of metabolic diseases and pubertal development disarrangements.
Epidemiological longitudinal studies evaluating the association of these food contaminants exposure in metabolic outcomes from childhood to adolescence are limited, and the uncertainties remain to be clarified.
