BabbelOn heard a new word the other day and being of a curious mind, decided to do some virtual digging.
The word was “acrylamide”. BabbelOn doesn’t want to frighten you, gentle readers, but here goes anyway:
”Acrylamide: A readily polymerized amide, C3H5NO …
Any chemical with the word NO in its formula can’t be all good.
“… derived from acrylic acid and used in synthetic fibers and sewage treatment. …”
Acid, synthetic fibers (sic) and sewage treatment are three things that all right thinking people should avoid. Distasteful, but nothing to hide under the bed about so far.
“… It is a carcinogen …”
The dreaded C word. This definition, like reality TV, just gets worse the further into it you get. Those readers brave enough to have stuck it out this far, prepare yourselves for the punchline:
“… and is present in some foods, especially starches and cereals that are cooked at high temperatures.”
Starches and cereals that are cooked at high temperatures. Hmmm, that only includes bread, chips, roast potatoes, cereals, pizza and probably many other things consumed in large quantities on a daily basis throughout the western world. All together now … “C3H5NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Time for a deep breath. In fact, why don’t you grab a cup of coffee and a biscuit while I do some more research.
Back and comfortable? OK, here’s what I found while you were in the kitchen. According to a World Health Organisation report in 2005, two of the highest concentrations of acrylamide are found in … coffee and biscuits.
Before we all go off the deep end, as a public service to its intelligent but time-poor public, BabbelOn has read the WHO report. It can be summarised as follows:
Acrylamide is bad for you. Just how bad, no-one is really sure.
For those of a scientific bent, here are some selected extracts:
“Although trace amounts of acrylamide can be formed by boiling, significant formation generally requires a processing temperature of 120 degrees Celsius or higher. Most acrylamide is accumulated during the final stages of baking, grilling or frying processes as the moisture content of the food falls and the surface temperature rises …
The major contributing foods to total exposure for most countries were french fries (16-30%), potato crisps (6-46%), coffee (13-39%), pastry and sweet biscuits (10-20%) and bread and rolls/toasts (10-30%). Other food items contributed less than 10% of the total exposure.
Margins of exposure (MOEs) have been calculated at intakes of 0.001 mg acrylamide/kg body weight/day, to represent the average intake of the general population based on national estimates. Comparison of these intakes with the no-observed-effect level (NOEL) of 0.2 mg/kg bw/day for morphological changes in nerves detected in rats would provide MOEs of 200 and 50, respectively.
When the value of 0.001 mg acrylamide/kg body weight/day taken to represent the average intake of the general population was compared with the benchmark dose of 0.30 mg/kg bw/day for induction of mammary tumors in rats, the MOE is 300. The Committee considered these MOEs to be low for a compound that is genotoxic and carcinogenic and that they may indicate a human health concern. Therefore, appropriate efforts to reduce acrylamide concentrations in foodstuffs should continue.”
Your correspondent is almost sorry he started this post. But stick with it, loyal readers, there is some light at the end of this tract (if not your intestinal one).
Let’s pause for a moment to spare a thought for the lab rats exposed to our new friends MOE and NOEL. A diet of chips and pastries probably sounded liked a pretty good gig as far as these things go. But it was obviously no picnic. One of the effects of the massive acrylamide doses fed to the rats was “atrophy of testes, reduced fertility and adverse effects on sperm count.” Why is it always the reproductive organs that cop it? Why can’t it be some less sensitive part of the anatomy, say the foot? Glad you asked, replies the WHO report. Another effect was something called “hindlimb foot splay”. Great. Shrunken testes and a limp.
At this point, lucky readers residing in western democracies will be thinking – “This whole acrylawhatever thing can’t be that serious or our government would have done something about it. At least they would have warned us, wouldn’t they? That’s what governments are for, isn’t it?”
Actually, that’s what the WHO is for. Governments only like to warn us about a problem when they know what the answer is and can reassure us that everything is under control. The only time a government will deliberately scare us is when it thinks there are votes in protecting us. If they don’t know what the answer is, they would rather we didn’t know about the problem and if we find out they will blame someone else. The best kind of threat is therefore one that no-one but the government knows about. Occasionally the truth gets out and all hell breaks loose (see Indian doctors who lend their SIM cards to relatives).
To be fair, the Californian government did do something about the WHO report; in 2005 it sued all the fast food companies.
The Californian Attorney General said at the time:
“In taking this action, I am not telling people to stop eating potato chips or french fries.”
He’s no fool.
“I know from personal experience that, while these snacks may not be a necessary part of a healthy diet, they sure taste good. But I, and all consumers, should have the information we need to make informed decisions about the food we eat.”
California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment then produced a list of acrylamide levels for 40 foods and estimated that:
“consumers of french fries receive up to 125 times the amount of acrylamide that requires a warning under current regulations, while consumers of potato chips receive as much as 75 times the level requiring a warning.”
And, being California, they also produced a diet guide. An acrylamide intake of .001 mg/day would be exceeded if one consumed the following foods on average once every . . .
Wheatena(TM) 30 days
French-fried potatoes 26 days
Canned sweet potatoes 26 days
Prune juice 16 days
Postum(TM) 14 days
Potato chips 14 days
Corn/tortilla chips 9 days
Cookies 7 days
Toast 7 days
Popcorn 4 days
Black olives, canned 4 days
Ready-to-eat cereal 4 days
Crackers 3 days
Pie 3 days
Pizza 3 days
Coffee 3 days
Peanut butter 2 days
Biscuits 2 days
Breads 1 to 2 days
Imagine trying to follow this Californian diet. Coffee no more than once every three days? Toast once a week? It’s tougher than the Israeli army diet and that was just apples and cheese.
To reach the WHO NOEL 0.3 mg/kg/day threshhold would require eating everything on the list every day. Now that might sound excessive (particulary the prune juice) but I would wager that there would be some people out there who could do it standing on their hindlimbs (eg. those recovering from the Israeli army diet).
Having led a somewhat antipodean life, BabbelOn was unfamiliar with Wheatena and Postum. Through the magic of the internet, here they are. Postum is apparently favoured by those who consider caffeine unhealthy (boy are they in for a shock) or who avoid caffeinated products for religious reasons, such as our old friends the Mormons.
It must be possible to import these products by mail order, even from the antipodes. Assuming that they could clear customs (perhaps by marking them “Acrylamide”) this could open up a lucrative new product line for Philip Nitschke; The Acrylamide Last Supper (TM). Begin with olives and crackers, hash browns and chips with a glass of prune juice, followed by coffee, whilst wearing nylon pyjamas. If that doesn’t finish you off, eat handfuls of Wheatena and Postum and jump into the nearest sewage treatment works.
So why aren’t our favourite TV shows interrupted with public health ads and our letterboxes stuffed with fridge magnets warning of the dangers of acrylamide?
A thorough search of the Australian government websites reveals this. A very informative notice on the Food Standards Australia & New Zealand web-site.
“FSANZ has kept a watching brief on international developments regarding acrylamide and has undertaken a limited assessment of the dietary exposure of Australian consumers to acrylamide. FSANZ will continue to work with other national governments to better understand the potential health risk from exposure to acrylamide in the diet.
FSANZ continues to recommend that consumers should eat a balanced diet containing a range of healthy foods (including a broad range of fruit and vegetables), and to limit high fat and fried foods, as much as possible.”
Great. Reading that in 2005 would certainly have caused one to immediately stop with the chips and the pizza and the toast and the coffee. To say nothing of the other foods (it says nothing of the other foods).
That acrylamine is found in food (and not just synthetics and sewage treatment), was first discovered by Swedish scientists in 2002. That the Swedes are involved should not be a surprise. This is what happens when high taxing, small “l” liberal governments spend their tax dollars funding research. Scientists who should be designing the latest mobile phones and plasma TVs instead come up with new ways to scare the acrylamide out of the rest of us. No wonder the Swedes are the heaviest drinkers in the world. Can you imagine what the TV news is like in Stockholm:
NEWSREADER
(Blonde, handsome, slightly depressed looking)
“Researchers at the Ingmar Bergman Institute for Premature Aging announced today that watching TV causes cancer. A three hour documentary follows.”
BabbelOn promised diligent and patient readers some good news. Here it is: According to the WHO report, alcoholic beverages, raw vegetables and meat are low in acrylamides. So is chocolate and milk.
One solution is therefore to have a stiff drink, a medium rare steak and a salad, or a family-size block of chocolate and a glass of warm milk. Perhaps while you are relaxing, you could listen to some Joe Jackson. After all … “there’s no cure, there’s no answer…”
In the end, it turns out that there is hope. The same scientists that frighten us sometimes also come up with a solution. In this case, it comes from just down the road from Sweden. A Danish company, Novozymes, recently announced that it has developed an enzyme (the poetically named “Acrylaway”), that food manufacturers can add to the cooking process to limit the production of acrylamide.
A recent Harvard study also appears to have cleared acrylamide of causing breast cancer (at least in humans).
Some perspective is also found in this report in 2005:
Even if no one today can answer the question of whether dietary acrylamide is hazardous to humans, it is not inconceivable to us that acrylamide can contribute approximately 1% of the lifetime cancer risk, considering that a large fraction of all cancers has been attributed to dietary factors. However, because the individual’s estimated cancer risk due to dietary acrylamide is quite small, there seems to be no reason to change nutritional guidelines, because the high consumption of foods such as potato chips or french fries should be avoided for other and more prominent health-related reasons, such as cardiovascular disease. However, the situation for vulnerable groups, e.g., pregnant women and children, should always be carefully considered.
In other words, the saturated fats will probably finish you off well before the acrylamide gets you.
Perhaps the Australian government is right after all that: “consumers should eat a balanced diet containing a range of healthy foods (including a broad range of fruit and vegetables), and to limit high fat and fried foods, as much as possible.”
Boring but sensible.
In conclusion, BabbelOn raises a glass of warm milk and toasts a future full of toast.
Here’s a final thought on risk management.
“There is no consensus definition of the precautionary principle, but one oft-mentioned statement [from the Wingspread conference in Racine, WI, in 1998] sums it up: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
This is an interesting point for the climate change debate. But that’s a whole other post for a whole other day.
After an exhaustive (and exhausting) search picking the eyes out of the acrylamide debate, BabbelOn emerges from his paranoid funk just long enough to go to sleep, dreaming of prune juice and sweet, sweet potatoes.
