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- MakaleAçık Erişim2026Scopus SJRQ1Influence of apple pomace and asparaginase on acrylamide levels in cookies and behavior during simulated gastric digestion: risk assessment perspectives
Sevim, Sumeyra; Macit, Arife; Farıa, Miguel A.; Viegas, Olga; Cunha, Sara C.; Kizil, Mevlude; Ferreira, Isabel M.P.L.V.O.
Cookies are widely consumed baked products; however, their contribution to dietary acrylamide (ACR) intake raises increasing health concerns. This study investigated the effects of apple pomace addition and asparaginase treatment on ACR levels in cookies, the fate of ACR during simulated gastric digestion using the INFOGEST semi-dynamic model, and the associated health risks of ACR exposure from cookie consumption. Risk assessment was conducted for adults (18–65 years) and children (3–10 years) using Monte Carlo simulation. Three formulations were evaluated: a control cookie, a cookie in which wheat flour was partially replaced with apple pomace, and a cookie containing asparaginase. Cookies formulated with apple pomace contained significantly lower ACR levels than the control (132 ± 8 μg/kg vs. 215 ± 11 μg/kg; p < 0.05), although the reduction was less pronounced than in cookies containing asparaginase (65 ± 14 μg/kg). During gastric digestion, ACR exhibited formulation-dependent release kinetics. Nevertheless, the total ACR released at the end of digestion was similar for control and pomace cookies, likely due to additional ACR formation in the stomach, despite differences in release patterns throughout digestion. Margin of Exposure (MOE) values for children remained well below 10,000, indicating a potential carcinogenic risk, although reductions of up to 59% were observed for control and pomace cookies after digestion. Target Hazard Quotient (THQ) values showed a slight increase after digestion in both age groups but remained below 1, suggesting no concern for chronic toxicity. Control cookies indicated a potential carcinogenic risk for children (ILCR = 1.56 × 10−4), whereas pomace and asparaginase formulations reduced this risk (ILCR = 9.59 × 10−5 and 4.72 × 10−5, respectively). However, simulated gastric digestion increased ILCR values for both control and pomace cookies (2.24 × 10−4 and 2.33 × 10−4, respectively). These findings indicate that dietary exposure to ACR cannot be assessed solely based on its concentration in food, and that digestive kinetics should be incorporated into health risk assessment.
- MakaleAçık Erişim2026Scopus SJRQ2Bernstein-smoothed estimation and bootstrap inference for the lower-tail Spearman's rho curve
Lyu, Guanjie; Ouimet, Frédéric; Susam, Selim O.
This paper studies a Bernstein-smoothed plug-in estimator for the lower-tail Spearman's rho curve, a rank-based measure of local concordance defined through a normalized copula integral over the lower-left square (Formula presented.). The estimator applies the lower-tail Spearman functional to the empirical Bernstein copula and introduces a degree parameter that controls finite-sample regularization. The contribution is target-specific estimation and inference for the lower-tail Spearman's rho curve rather than a new general-purpose copula estimator. We establish uniform strong consistency on compact intervals away from zero whenever (Formula presented.). Under a target-specific integrated Bernstein-bias condition and (Formula presented.), we derive functional weak convergence with the same first-order Gaussian limit as the empirical copula-based estimator; this degree regime includes (Formula presented.). For inference, we justify a smoothed beta bootstrap based on sampling from the empirical beta copula and construct pointwise confidence intervals from the absolute centred bootstrap root. Monte Carlo experiments for the Farlie–Gumbel–Morgenstern, Gaussian, Clayton, and Frank copulas assess pointwise coverage over the threshold grid and show that Bernstein smoothing generally reduces integrated variance and often lowers mean integrated squared error under weak to moderate dependence. Additional common-sample experiments compare the proposed estimator with the empirical beta and empirical checkerboard Bernstein copula estimators in terms of pointwise error, integrated error, computation time, selected degrees, numerical stability, and pointwise coverage. A sensitivity analysis shows that (Formula presented.) is a simple theoretically admissible default that avoids the most severe oversmoothing. A descriptive application to the Loss–ALAE insurance claims data illustrates how the lower-tail Spearman's rho curve can reveal local dependence features that are not captured by the global Spearman correlation.
