Stalemate on safe levels of carcinogen

The jury is still out on safe dietary intake levels of acrylamide - a known carcinogen formed during frying, baking and roasting - and cancer, claimed a leading medical epidemiologist who said there was currently no consensus on the issue.

Nobody really knows the levels of human dietary intake that increase the likelihood of cancer, said Dr Jenny Barratt, a reader in biostatistics and genetic epidemiology at the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Leeds.

Barratt, who will be presenting a summary of the latest epidemiological evidence relating dietary exposure to acrylamide and cancer risk to a meeting organised by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) later this month, said: “What they are trying to do is find better ways of measuring the intake to the diet and the relationship to risk.”

The EFSA colloquium aims to bring together the latest scientific thinking on potential acrylamide carcinogenicity links to dietary exposure. Barratt will summarise the results of around 12 epidemiological studies that have been carried out since the last colloquium on this subject was held in 2005.

At a meeting organised by The UK’s Food Additives and Ingredients Association last month, science writer Dr John Emsley claimed that the risks from dietary exposure to acrylamide in most cases were so small as to make the risk of cancer negligible. “The truth is there is nothing to worry about,” said Emsley, who referred to a paper published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2003.

However, Barratt said: “Nobody is in a position to categorically rule out any risk.” While it might be possible to exclude significant risks from normal consumption patterns, she said: “What people are concerned about is things we know to be harmful where there is a very high exposure, perhaps at a young age: people at the extreme. Are they going to be at risk?”