[News Terms] Spotlight on 'Acceptable Daily Intake' Amid Aspartame Controversy

'Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI)' refers to the maximum amount of a substance that a healthy person can safely consume daily over a lifetime.

When chemical substances are excessively administered to laboratory animals, it can lead to death. The amount is adjusted to measure the dose at which half of the test animals die within one week, and one hundredth of that amount is usually set as the ADI. For example, if the ADI of a certain additive is 1 mg/kg/day, the allowable daily intake of that additive for an adult weighing 70 kg would be 70 mg.

Makgeolli and other items are displayed at a mart in downtown Seoul.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

Exceeding this amount may cause toxic effects. This applies to food additives contained in food, residues of drugs or pesticides, and chemical substances. The unit is expressed as mg/kg/day, where mg represents the amount of the substance, kg refers to per kilogram of body weight, and day (d) indicates one day. For environmental pollutants or other chemical substances not found in food, the term 'Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI)' is used.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety recently stated on the 4th that the intake level of aspartame, an artificial sweetener used as a sugar substitute, is relatively low in Korea amid ongoing controversy. Kang Baek-won, spokesperson for the Ministry, said in a briefing, "According to the International Food Additives Expert Committee, a 70 kg adult can safely consume 2.8 g of aspartame daily over a lifetime," and emphasized, "In Korea, the average intake is only 0.12% of this standard, which is considerably lower compared to other countries."

According to the Ministry, a child weighing 35 kg would have to consume more than 33 cans of diet cola (250 ml containing 43 mg of aspartame) per day, and an adult weighing 60 kg would have to drink 33 bottles of Makgeolli (750 ml containing 72.7 mg of aspartame) daily to exceed the ADI.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.