Experts: Food-cancer link a concern

GENEVA, June 27 — There is a “major concern” that a substance in certain high-carbohydrate foods — such as french fries and potato chips— may cause cancer, health experts said Thursday after a three-day U.N.-sponsored conference on the subject.

THE EXPERTS did not, however, issue guidelines warning consumers against eating foods with the potentially cancer-causing substance, acrylamide. Instead, they said further study is necessary to determine the extent of the risk — and how to reduce it.

“It is a matter of high concern and we need to do research quite urgently in order to be able to reduce the levels of acrylamide in food,” said Dieter Arnold, a scientist with Germany’s Federal Institute of Health Protection for Consumers, who chaired the session.

The meeting was convened following a study by Sweden’s National Food Administration this year that found high levels of acrylamide in french fries, some brands of potato chips, some types of breakfast cereal and crispbread and some types of bread fried or baked at high temperatures. Boiled foods did not contain the substance.

The findings of the Swedish study had been greeted with some skepticism — not least because they were announced at a government news conference rather than subject to peer review in a scientific publication.

After the Swedish findings were announced, studies in Norway, Britain, Switzerland, Germany and the United States made similar observations.

The closed meeting in Geneva grouped 23 scientists from universities and national food authorities, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It was sponsored by the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization.

Arnold said there were no plans to single out specific foods that should be avoided.

“On the basis of the information we currently have we cannot give consumers very specific advice such as please avoid eating chips of this and that brand. This will not be done,” Arnold said.

“We would rather say that people should eat a balanced and varied diet which includes plenty of fruit and vegetable and that they should moderate their consumption of fried and fatty foods.”

Big, and thus far unexplained, differences were found between brands and types of products. For instance, said Arnold, breakfast cereals that were coated in sugar and then processed seemed to contain higher levels of acrylamide.

French fries cooked until they were brown rather than just lightly done also contained higher levels, he said.

There are various risks of cancer in food — for instance, grilling or barbecuing meat can form carcinogenic substances. But what shocked scientists was the high level of acrylamide found.

A survey conducted for the U.S.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest found that the amount of acrylamide in a large order of fast-food french fries was at least 300 times more than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows in a glass of water.

Acrylamide, sometimes used in water-treatment facilities, is a known carcinogen in rats. There is no conclusive proof that it causes cancer in humans.

WHO and FAO officials stressed that much more research was needed to gain a complete picture. So far 200 analyses have been completed worldwide in North America and Europe. The U.N. bodies now want to set up a network to channel data from governments, universities and industry into one central database and to include research from Africa, Asia and South America.

“Whenever analysis has been repeated in different laboratories on the same sample using the same method or different methods, they came to the same results. We unanimously concluded the Swedish results are valid and have to be taken seriously,” Arnold said.

“The experts were unanimous and clear that this is a major concern,” said Jorgen Schlundt, coordinator of WHO’s food safety division.

It's being debunked

French Fry Scare, Part II

The food police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest have jumped on the recent health scare involving French fries and potato chips. Not surprisingly, its new effort at food terrorism is self-debunking.

Swedish "scientists" surprised us in April with their finding that baking and frying high-carbohydrate foods — like bread and potatoes — forms in the foods "high" levels of acrylamide, a substance that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labels as a "probable carcinogen."

Based on this announcement the World Health Organization held an "urgent expert consultation" this week on the Swedish findings.

Apparently to help the WHO press the panic button, CSPI released a June 25 report claiming "Popular American brands of snack chips and French fries contain disturbingly high levels of acrylamide, according to new laboratory tests commissioned by CSPI."

Some of CSPI’s results include: a large order of McDonald’s French fries contained 600 times more acrylamide than the EPA allows in a glass of drinking water; a one-ounce serving of Pringle’s Potato Crisps contained 208 times more acrylamide than allowed; and one ounce of Honey Nut Cheerios contained 50 times more acrylamide than allowed.

Sounds scary — but it’s not!

In the first place, it’s far from clear that acrylamide is at all a cancer-causing substance. Some scientists seem to have induced cancer in laboratory rats by feeding them the "maximum tolerated dose" of acrylamide — an amount just below the level the rats would be poisoned from simply eating the acrylamide.

The rats used in such experiments are bred to be genetically disposed to cancer. They are so susceptible to cancer that merely changing the amount of food they consume affects their cancer risk.

In the study used by the EPA as the basis for its limit on acrylamide in drinking water, the lowest lifetime daily dose at which the rats had a significant increase in cancer risk was 500 micrograms (millionths of a gram) per kilogram of bodyweight.

For a 154-pound human, this equates to a lifetime daily dose of 35,000 micrograms.

What does this mean for CSPI’s results?

I hope you like McDonald’s French fries because you’d have to eat 486 large servings — weighing out at 182 pounds — every day for life to get the same amount of acrylamide as the EPA’s lab rats. If you prefer low-fat foods, how about 5,000 one-ounce servings — weighing out at 312 pounds — of Honey Nut Cheerios per day for life?

You could actually probably eat even more French fries and Cheerios because there’s no evidence that acrylamide causes cancer in humans! Even the EPA describes the evidence concerning acrylamide and human cancer risk as "inadequate."

Nevertheless, CSPI got Clark University professor Dale Hattis to say, "I estimate that acrylamide causes several thousand cancers per year in Americans."

Hattis must be referring to those who survive scarfing down all that food.

Since I doubt that CSPI chief Michael Jacobson really believes that acrylamide is any sort of actual threat, what’s CSPI’s angle in all this foolishness?

CSPI stated in its press release that the Food and Drug Administration "should be advising consumers to cut back on the most contaminated and least nutritious foods while more testing is done across the food supply."

The "most contaminated and least nutritious foods" just happen to be the same foods — fast food French fries, for example — that CSPI routinely attacks as being unhealthy. Acrylamide hysteria is nothing more than a convenient, if not cynical, tactic of CSPI to advance its anti-fun food agenda.

Of course the instigating and crowning buffoonery to the acrylamide controversy is the WHO’s "urgent" meeting, which ended with the WHO panel calling acrylamide a "major concern." Although further study was recommended (predictably), no warning to consumers was issued — yet.

Instead the WHO panel restated standard nutritional guidelines calling for balanced diets with plenty of fruit and vegetables and limited amounts of fatty or fried food — CSPI will no doubt use that recommendation to badger the FDA .

But during the three days of the WHO meeting, more than 16,000 third-world children died from food and water contaminated with bacteria — that’s according to the WHO’s own estimates. What’s the WHO doing to prevent these largely avoidable deaths?

It’s perpetuating another activist-friendly, but bogus food scare.

The effects of processing oils are becoming more widely known. Whether the conclusions of these studies are borne out or not, the simple act of processing and refining oils changes the molecular structure of the fatty acids they contain.

Every single cell in our bodies use fatty acids. Oils in our diet are necessary, but our body doesn't know how to use oils that have been processed. When our body is fed a steady diet of "bad" oils, and we have a shortage of the "good" oils (specifially oils that are high in the essential fatty acids of Omega 3s and Omega 6s) our body breaks down.

This is a condition called fatty degeneration. Aside from people who have genetic causes (very few), most degenerative diseases (i.e. diabetes, cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, etc., etc.) can be improved or even completely reversed by removing the "bad" fats from the sufferer's diet and by providing the good fats the body needs.

A good source of information on this subject was written by Udo Erasmus, who has been studying the effects of fats on health for the last two decades. His book, Fats That Heal Fats That Kill was his thesis that earned him his PhD in Nutrition.

If you ever read a book on health, this should be it. The information is quite enlightning and is written to be understood by laypersons and still be authoritave enough to be useful for medical professionals.

You can read some of the basics that are covered in much greater detail in his book by checking out some of his articles at his website, udoerasmus.com. Specifically, his lecture, "Fats That Heal Fats That Kill:The complete Lecture" is in-depth enough to get a good idea of the nature of the book, and the nature of oils.

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