![]() ![]() This week, the UK’s Food Standard Agency became the latest regulator to draw consumers’ attention to the issue with its Go for Gold campaign that urges the public to avoid singeing their toast or leaving roast potatoes to char in the oven. And nearly a decade on, there is a lingering question, never satisfactorily resolved, over whether we should be worried about acrylamide in our diet. The resultant public health advice became embroiled in controversy, however (“For me as a scientist it was a bit of a tough period,” Törnqvist recalls). ![]() After discounting beef burgers as the source, Törnqvist and colleagues had discovered that acrylamide is found in highest concentrations in starchy food, like bread and potatoes, when it is cooked at high temperatures.īy 2000, the team had published a study involving rats being fed fried food that concluded that acrylamide consumption “is associated with a considerable cancer risk”. Since the compound is not found in wild animals, processed food was identified as the likely culprit. “We realised that if this background signal really was acrylamide it meant that ordinary people are always exposed to acrylamide,” said Törnqvist. Unexpectedly though, significant levels of the chemical were also present in a control group. Professor Margareta Törnqvist, an environmental chemist at Stockholm University, was enlisted to carry out tests on the construction workers, which revealed high levels of acrylamide in their bloodstream. What began as an environmental scandal soon morphed into a public health scare. ![]()
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