1. Introduction
Worldwide, there is a growing demand for high-quality, safe,
health-promoting or disease-risk reducing foods, including food
supplements (Council of Europe, 2005; FDA, 2004). The goal of
the European Commission financed, Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7) project, PlantLIBRA (PLANT food supplements:
Levels of Intake, Benefit and Risk Assessment) (Larranaga-
Guetaria, 2012) was to improve the plant food supplement (PFS)
scientific knowledge base to better assess the risks and benefits
of PFS, and enable science-based decision making by regulators
and stakeholders, ultimately ensuring a safer use of PFS by consumers.
In order to make informed decisions, competent authorities
and industry require better tools such as databases to
provide more accessible and quality-assured information.
Consequently, an objective of the PlantLIBRA project was to
transfer this body of knowledge to a meta-database and a single
platform with easily searchable and retrievable data on beneficial
bioactivity data, botanical information, case reports of adverse
effects, chemical composition, and potential contaminants in PFS
for PFS risk–benefit assessments.