CSPI Lied On Acrylamide

ConsumerFreedom.com ^ | July 10, 2003 | Anon.

[Pharmboy]

Tomorrow the misnamed Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) will hold an "Integrity in Science" conference where attendees will "learn how corporate dollars are used to buy scientists." CSPI's implicit assumption is that any scientific research -- whether on clean energy, food technology, or life-saving pharmaceuticals -- is inherently suspect if any of its support comes from corporate sources. Rather than judge the scientists, CSPI would judge their grantmakers. And of course any criticism of CSPI's brand of "scientific" research coming from corporate-funded sources is inherently flawed.

CSPI itself refuses corporate support, so its scientific research should be fact-driven, and devoid of politics (stop laughing!). But it turns out that CSPI's petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over acrylamide in food was just the latest in a long string of pseudo-scientific reports motivated by an antagonism towards tasty food and the companies that provide it. Today the Center for Consumer Freedom submitted to the FDA a response to CSPI's initial acrylamide petition. You can read our complete report to the FDA here. Among the many lapses in CSPI's scientific "integrity":

In making its flawed case to the FDA, CSPI acknowledged that it arbitrarily "adjusted [USDA] consumption data" reflecting Americans' intake of nine categories of foods. The resulting inflated numbers allowed CSPI to suggest that Americans consume 27 percent more acrylamide than U.S. government data actually indicate.

CSPI's petition makes the unsubstantiated claim that acrylamide "might cause (pancreatic) cancer in humans," but CSPI goes on to admit in a footnote that the authors of its cited study "did not find an association between acrylamide and cancer."

CSPI knowingly underestimated the average American body weight by more than 7 percent in order to overestimate acrylamide's theoretical carcinogenic effects. This blunder is particularly ironic, considering that CSPI has gone out of its way in recent years to claim that America is in the throes of an "obesity epidemic."

CSPI purposely limited itself to 1994-96 government data because including readily available data from 1998 would have resulted in lower acrylamide intake numbers.

CSPI admits that its chosen method of estimating cancer risk is outdated. Immediately after concluding that "dietary acrylamide causes an estimated 8,900 cancers per year, or 670,000 over the [U.S.] population's lifetime," CSPI concedes that "using more recent EPA methods for projecting cancer-risk findings may result in estimates several-fold less." CCF's filing with the FDA concludes:

CSPI's alarmist report to the FDA on the "dangers" of acrylamide is scientifically bankrupt, and should be disregarded wholly by regulators. The organization has a long history of attacking companies that produce the foods Americans enjoy most. This latest stunt, while devoid of any scientific basis, illustrates CSPI's now-legendary biases. The FDA should use this episode to make an example of CSPI, focusing on the tactics it uses to alarm consumers without any scientific basis. Organizations purporting to act "in the public interest" should be held to a high standard of scientific literacy and ethical conduct. In this case, CSPI has demonstrated neither. The public should be increasingly wary, and the government should decline to act upon petitions as ill-informed as CSPI's.

[Pharmboy]

Of course they're liars: they're lefty wack-jobs.

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[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[VOA]

bump

[RonF]

I spent quite a bit of time in grad school and my first job out of grad school working with acrylamide. WHAT THE F@&K IS ACRYLAMIDE DOING IN FOOD?! I don't care who these guys are, or frankly what their agenda is. If this stuff is in food, something's WRONG!

[facedown]

It's saccharine all over again.

[bruin66]

But it turns out that CSPI's petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over acrylamide in food...

Where would this stuff be found?

[KarlInOhio]

I took a quick look around the web and it looks like it comes from heating starches to above 100 degrees C.

[talleyman]

Everything is in food - in trace amounts.

[Pharmboy]

Acrylamide in Food

Acrylamide is a chemical which has been shown to be present in food as a result of cooking practices, some of which have been used for many years, even centuries. Therefore finding ways to reduce the levels is not straight-forward. In particular, starchy foods have been shown to be affected, such as potato and cereal products which have been deepfried, roasted or baked at high temperatures. The possible risk to public health is unclear.

To help identify what can be done to reduce levels of acrylamide in food, to better understand the chemical effects of processing and cooking and to help clarify the possible risk to public health, the Commission is co-ordinating several initiatives in the EU.

A database to summarise the research activities within the EU (ACRYLAMIDE DATABASE) has been prepared by the Commission in close collaboration with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The Commission’s Joint Research Centre is co-ordinating work on analytical methods and is collecting data on the levels detected in different foods. For long-term research needs, the Commission has included the topic in its 6th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

After the presence of acrylamide in food was highlighted by the Swedish Authorities in April 2002, the Commission urgently consulted its Scientific Committee on Food (SCF) to assess the possible risk to public health. The SCF reported its opinion on acrylamide on 3 July 2002. It concluded that levels should be reduced to as low as reasonably achievable, although more data were needed in several areas to help towards reducing levels and to help clarify the safety implications.

[RonF]

Well, if it's present because of standard cooking practices, that's one thing. If it's present, or if it's presence is increased, because of cooking practices used to make mass production of food more economical, then it would be objectionable to me. I used to wear gloves when I worked with this stuff and scrub like hell if I got it on me. Of course, I was working with the pure reagent (I made and used polyacrylamide gel electrophoreisis), not trace amounts of it.

[PurVirgo]

ditto that... I took a biotech class where we performed an electrophoresis with acrylamide. The MSDS referred to it's oogenic properties. My professor couldn't even handle it b/c she was pregnant at the time.

[Old Professer]

I spent quite a bit of time in grad school and my first job out of grad school working with acrylamide. WHAT THE F@&K IS ACRYLAMIDE DOING IN FOOD?! I don't care who these guys are, or frankly what their agenda is. If this stuff is in food, something's WRONG!

IIRC, the presence of acrylamide in food is the result of high-temperature methods of cooking such as deep-fryong, broiling, grilling and pan-frying due to a chemical change in the natural product due to high-heat.

I'm sure somebody here has a piece bookmarked somewhere on this.

[Pharmboy]

The Dose Makes the Poison has always been the foundation of toxicology. Whenever toxicities are discussed, dosage must be discussed: it's arm-waving otherwise.

With the lab equipment presently available you can pick up really tiny amounts of whatever, but it doesn't really mean anything except to serve as a (false) rallying cry for the anti-business, more-governement-control groups.

[RonF]

There's a difference between a poison and a carcinogen. There's also an issue with extrapolating studies performed on animals at high dosages over short times to predicting effects on humans being exposed to low dosages over long times. But acrylamide is bad stuff, and any artificial addition of it to the food supply makes me pretty uncomfortable. It's easy to blame anti-business/government-control types for the current regulatory situation, but let's not forget that there have also been issues of unscrupulous corporations and corporate officers embracing private profits over morality and public safety.

The free market works great when you can accept corporate mistakes. If a frozen waffle company makes lousy-tasting frozen waffles, people buy some lousy frozen waffles, say "blah", toss them out, and they're out a few bucks. "After the fact" is fine here. Now say the problem is that there's salmonella in those waffles, and a few kids die. "After the fact" is no good with this. So, we end up with regulation.

Do some advocates go overboard with the kinds of regulation they propose? Sure. But this isn't a binary decision set. We have to have some government regulation. How much of what kind? That's what democracy is all about.