UKC

Er, except no it won't:

"Even adults with the highest consumption of acrylamide would need to consume 160 times as much to reach a level that might cause increased tumours in mice.'

Why on Earth did the Beeb publish this Daily Fail sh*t?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:




Operation enrage the public on the drive to work ?
Hey it's a "post-truth world" we are living in . Why let a little thing like details destroy a good story .


TWS

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Same thing with aspartame.. you'd need to drink something like 32 gallons in a single sitting to equate to the dosage given to lab rats in the oft quoted experiment before they showed any signs of damage. Ironically, it's the same people protesting about it that are against animal testing.

In reply to mrphilipoldham:


Didn't realise they took registers at these things.

In reply to ianstevens:

Sorry not in person, that'd be asking too much of them. You know, Facebook protesting. Sharing stuff they have no understanding of other than general outrage. That kind of protesting.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Same reason as the Gruinard https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/23/ancer-risk-roast-potatoes-t... its the sh*t people like to read about .

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

It gets on my tits. Red wine will kill you. Oh no it won't its healthy in moderation. Red wine will kill you. oh no it won't etc etc. I always look at the how the study was done and what the sample size used was.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

To be fair, when they had it on the Today Programme this morning, they also had someone on to say it was bollocks.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

My understanding of the 'red wine good' argument is that about a quarter of a glass, 3 times a week, is the sort of moderation contemplated. My version of moderate consumption alas is more like 3 bottles a week. Ho hum.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Unfortunately, there is a sector of the population who have never tasted anything other than burnt starch and tobacco smoke.

In reply to mrphilipoldham:


Except that acrylamide very definitely is a carcinogen. The question is, how much exposure do you get from burnt sugars and how often? I don't think anyone was saying that burnt toast is an immediate threat to life, it was more suggesting that avoiding unnecessary frequent exposure was something you might want to add to your lifestyle choices.

Aspartame on the other hand is less dangerous than the sugar it replaces according to all the evidence I've ever seen.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Fact: Acrylamides are bad for you. Oh but we are in a post-truth post modernist world where facts are what you want them to be. What do scientists know? Lets shoot the messenger.' I knew a man that smoked Capstan double strength and he lived to 95'.' My mother eat burnt toast all her life and lived to 85'. ' My grandfather in WW1 was the only one in his company to survive when they were machine-gunned'-nothing wrong with being machine gunned then if one survives into old age. It seems if facts dont suit your lifestyle you just deny them and they will go away to be replaced by ones that you invent yourself. We're in a Brave New World now.

In reply to Siward:


You're not trying hard enough

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Why on earth did you start a thread with this sh*t?

In reply to Dave Garnett:

I haven't looked into it for ages - but there are many things to test aspartame against:
1) acute problems (e.g. the rat overdose)
2) chronic problems (much harder to test, who will want to eat aspartame for years and be monitored?)
2.1) indirect problems. E.g. apparently even tasting sweet things can release a small amount of insulin ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17510492 ). On it's own - meh? But in a population, or over many years - this extra insulin could be bad. E.g. quoting from wikipedia:

Although some researchers have stated that aspartame contributes to weight gain, hunger and increase in appetite,[8][68] broad reviews and regulators conclude that aspartame has no appreciable effect on appetite.[8][38] - so yeah, this extra insulin, combined with the fact there is no glucose to bind (i.e. a double-effect) could make you fat (because whatever glucose [even if it was doing a real job] the insulin can scrounge up gets sequestered), and because the body expects sugar but gets nothing (and lost stuff from before) you get hungry. What happens if the body recalibrates so that sweet taste releases way less insulin? That's bad too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_substitute#Weight_gain
A systematic review concluded that there is a correlation between consumption of artificially sweetened beverages and weight gain in children, but that no clear causal link has been determined.[35] [36]

I don't know whether these effects are significant - but just wanted to say it's not as simple as poisoning some rats and saying it's okay to eat

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:




How long has the Daily mail been doing scientific research for

Presumably the mice were only fed acrylamide for a fairly short period of time, they don't actually live very long. Whereas a human who's been eating burn't toast for 50 years may build up a sufficient level of it to cause tumours perhaps? I don't know if that's how it works with acrylamide but then I haven't read the original published research.
I heard the report on the Today programme this morning, it wasn't particularly alarmist in tone. Perhaps the report in the Mail was, but then I don't read it.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

can anyone explain the alleged difference between brown and white toast - is brown that wappy colored stuff in a plastic bag or is it real wholemeal ??

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

This has concerned me to the point I'm down to four crumpets for breakfast.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

In such matters I turn to the work of David Spiegelhalter, a black-belt statistician and risk assessor who has serious mathematical hustle and will often tackle 'meeja' scare stories like this.

https://fullfact.org/health/how-dangerous-burnt-toast/

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Well, quite

In reply to LeeWood:


It should all be brown, shouldn't it? Otherwise, it's not been toasted.

In reply to aln:


Well it is brown

In reply to Shani:


Yes, this is very balanced. I used to handle a lot of acrylamide and so I'm used to the idea that it's nasty and to be avoided. However, the real risks to me were the neurotoxicity and that's a completely different order of risk from the possible slight long-term carcinogenicity from eating burnt roast potatoes.

As I said, something you might want to be aware of, among a mass of other daily lifestyle choices, but not something I'm going to lie awake worrying about. Certainly insignificant compared to the other risks from eating too much of everything, including potatoes, however cooked.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

If anyone is interested, there is a bit of information on the European Chemicals Agency Website (https://echa.europa.eu/substance-information/-/substanceinfo/100.001.067). You can then follow what the EU is up to with acrylamide, from a worker and environment perspective. The burnt toast angle is for Food Standards people.

Neurotox is old hat with acrylamide, but the carcinogenicity question is a more recent concern, and it keeps on turning up in cooked food. Burnt food (such as BBQ meat) does generate a number of potent mutagens , via the maillard reaction. In this respect, burnt food has always posed a health risk. These "food mutagens" tend to be Ames positive at low concentrations.

In reply to kipper12:

Good link. TBH though, I am more concerned about popcorn lung.

In reply to Jim Fraser:


I love the smell of burnt starch in the morning

In reply to Shani:

I was going to follow up with a PS:

If acrylamide is genotoxic (DNA damaging) then the prevailing approach is to regulate as a non threshold, the assumption (not one I subscribe to) is that any exposure even one molecule could in principle cause a mutation. The easiest way to manage such risk is to stop exposure. With food mutagens, this is not always that easy, hence the advice to be sensible.

With threshold carcinogens, the approach is different, we identify a NOAEL (No Observable Adverse Effect) or a mathematical estimate of. We then apply some assumptions which reflect confidence in the data, extrapolation from animal models and humans being (usually) etc outbred to arrive at an estimate of a safe level.

For some uses, threshold carcinogens can be banned even though it is perfectly possible to establish a safe level. Such an approach is more political than scientific.