After barmy official cancer warning, top food writer leads Sun bid to save chips and all our home-cooked food
WHO doesn’t love a home-cooked chip – and what could be better than crisply roasted potatoes?
The best are crustily roasted to amber brown. In my family, there’s always a battle for who gets the tastiest, darker, crunchy bits that stick to the roasting pan.
Now the Government’s Food Standards Agency is telling us that these great British food staples could cause cancer.
Its new Go For Gold campaign warns us that if we value our health, our chips and roasties must not go any darker than blonde.
The FSA also warns that well-browned toast poses a similar cancer risk. So at a stroke, Government health experts have instructed us to put some of the most affordable, comforting, homely foods at the top of our “to be avoided” list.
This dire warning is yet another dose of the increasingly ludicrous, dangerously skewed eating advice the Government doles out.
It’s time for a citizens’ mutiny — and here’s why.
The chemical that the FSA boffins are fussing over is acrylamide.
It is created when sugars and amino acids in starchy foods are cooked at high temperature and turn food brown.
The US Environmental Protection Agency says acrylamide is a “probable carcinogen” in humans.
Research has shown that women who eat foods high in acrylamide during pregnancy are more likely to produce babies with lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences.
So make no mistake, you want as little of it as possible in your diet.
But the FSA is not telling us the whole story. The truth is that the major source of acrylamide is not the food we make at home, but the processed, packaged, starchy foods that we eat daily — crisps, oven chips (home-cooked chips have far less acrylamide), breakfast cereals, biscuits, crackers, crispbreads, battered and breadcrumbed products and coffee.
UK researchers have pinpointed crisps and oven chips as the key culprits
What’s even worse is that according to acrylamide monitoring research, British babies have the highest levels in their bloodstream in Europe.
How come? UK researchers have pinpointed crisps and oven chips as the key culprits.
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So if the FSA really wants to reduce acrylamide levels, it should be telling us to cut down on crisps, oven chips, breakfast cereals and starchy foods that routinely contain it.
Why hasn’t the FSA done this? By wagging its finger at home cooks, it hopes to create the impression that it’s taking effective action to reduce our exposure.
Actually, the FSA’s focus should be the big companies in the food industry that sell us packaged foods containing worryingly high levels of this toxin, because that is where the true risk lies.
Scientists analysing acrylamide for the EU-funded Heatox research project into heat-generated food toxins say the amount of acrylamide we eat in home-cooked food is “relatively small when compared with industrially or restaurant-prepared foods”.
So why hound ordinary people in their homes when big household-name brands overwhelmingly cause the problem? Ever since it was set up in 2000, the FSA has blamed individuals and families for health and safety problems while letting the big companies that are truly responsible off the hook.
Look at the FSA’s ongoing vendetta against butter. It tells us to avoid this traditional food and to eat hi-tech margarine because it is too scared to stand up to powerful margarine companies.
Now we know the trans fats it urged us to eat in marge and spreads can be lethal.
This time the dangerous absurdity is that the Government is urging us to fill up on acrylamide-loaded products through its NHS Choices Eatwell Guide, which tells us to “base our meals on starchy foods”.
Meanwhile, it meekly accepts food firms’ hollow assurances that they are changing their preparation methods to limit our exposure.
While households are told to cut out some favourite foods, the scandalous truth is that our Government isn’t making companies measure or report levels of acrylamide, or even tell customers their foods contain it.
The Government hasn’t set upper legal limits for this chemical in food either. No surprise there.
Powerful food industry lobby groups, such as FoodDrinkEurope, Serving Europe (it represents fast food chains), and the International Association of Plant Bakers, have dictated our Government’s acrylamide script.
This latest acrylamide nonsense is just another example of how official food advice is alarmingly wrong.
It puts me in the mood for some nicely browned roasties and crisp, well-done toast.
Toast alert: stop at 319 slices
YOU would have to eat 320 slices of burnt toast a day to make any significant increase to your cancer risk, an expert claims.
Cambridge statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter analysed figures provided by the European Food Safety Authority, which said that only exposures of 170mg or more of acrylamide per kg of body weight were thought to increase a person’s risk of cancer.
He said: “My concern is that the evidence that this actually causes any harm is extremely weak.
“There have been 16 studies trying to show that there is an association of consumption with cancer and none has shown anything consistent at all.
There is no direct evidence that anyone has ever got cancer due to acrylamide so I’m concerned that campaigns such as this could divert attention from really important issues to do with balanced diet and obesity.”
Studies on the carcinogen have only been conducted on mice, and its effects on humans are relatively unknown, he added.
Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of books on Britain’s food industry.