*This record is given in both English and Spanish In 2011, the Scientific Committee of the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN) performed a risk assessment of the Spanish population’s exposure to cadmium. Since then, there have been updates that include the adoption of new maximum limits of cadmium content in food products and the completion of two new food consumption surveys carried out by AESAN: ENALIA (National Dietary Survey on the Child and Adolescent Population) and ENALIA-2 (National Dietary Survey on Adults, the Elderly and Pregnant Women). The Scientific Committee has performed a new risk assessment of dietary exposure for the Spanish population to cadmium, taking into account about 3000 new occurrence data on cadmium in different food categories collected between 2014 and 2017 in Spain. The estimate of the dietary intake of cadmium was performed by means of a deterministic model of calculation based on the mean contamination value for the lower bound (LB) and the upper bound (UB) of the daily consumption of each food product among different age groups (toddlers (12-35 months), other children (3-9 years), adolescents (10-17 years), and adults (18-64 years)), and the assumed body weight for each of them. Considering the contamination scenarios LB and UB, in both cases it has been found that soluble cocoa powder (215.3-215.3 μg Cd/kg), molluscs (172.8-178.5 μg Cd/kg) and chocolate and chocolate-based products (114.0-116.7 μg Cd/kg) are the food groups that display the highest mean concentration of cadmium. The main contributor to cadmium intake in adults are molluscs. Although there were fewer samples for analysis, soluble cocoa powder was found to be the main contributor to cadmium intake in age groups 3-17 years, whereas the potato contributes the highest amount of cadmium to the diet of toddlers aged 12-35 months. Toddlers are especially vulnerable to cadmium exposure, as they consume a greater amount of food in relation to their body weight. Nevertheless, as it is reasonable to assume that real dietary exposure to cadmium would be closer to the estimate derived from the use of the LB rather than the UB of contamination, it may be concluded that cadmium exposure is within the safety margins of safety for all population groups in Spain. Lower dietary exposure to cadmium has been observed in Spanish adults from 2010 onwards, of 26 % and 42 % in the lower bound and upper bound estimates, respectively, although differences in the quantification limits and in the food consumption data of the studies may influence these results. For all population groups, the extreme consumption of molluscs is the main dietary source of cadmium. Although unlikely, any scenario of chronic exposure which includes the extreme consumption of any food group constitutes a risk of cadmium exposure over and above the established Tolerable Weekly Intake (TWI).Eng

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