: Richard Lawley

Back in April 2002 the food industry was in a state approaching turmoil following the discovery by Swedish scientists that a potentially carcinogenic chemical, acrylamide, was mysteriously turning up in various foods where it had no right to be. The discovery launched a flurry of research, which continues to this day.

We have learnt a great deal about how acrylamide comes to be in foods. We know that it is actively produced when starchy materials are cooked at high temperatures, as a by-product of Maillard browning reactions. We now know for sure that acrylamide is a carcinogen and is genotoxic (can damage a cell’s genetic material). What we don’t yet know is whether acrylamide is a health risk at the concentrations found in food, and whether exposure to acrylamide in the diet is safe.

The many studies looking at this have so far failed to demonstrate any conclusive evidence of adverse health effects in humans. Then again, this type of toxicological research takes time and it is almost impossible to prove that anything is completely safe. In the meantime, food safety authorities have adopted the view that acrylamide is an undesirable, though apparently inevitable, consequence of baking, frying or roasting starchy foods. Current policy is that practical measures should be taken voluntarily to reduce acrylamide formation in vulnerable foods and so lessen human exposure to the chemical.

Fortunately, knowledge about the factors controlling acrylamide production has enabled industry to devise strategies to limit its formation. This is best exemplified by the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries of the EU (CIAA) acrylamide ‘toolbox’ – a series of documents describing measures that manufacturers can use to reduce acrylamide levels in susceptible food products. The tools have been around for several years now and industry has had some time to assess and implement them. This begs the question – does food contain less acrylamide now than it did before?

To answer this the European Commission recommended that EU member states monitor acrylamide levels in certain foods over a period from 2007-2009. The results for 2008 have just been published by EFSA and show something of a mixed picture. Encouragingly, several food types showed a significant drop in average acrylamide content over the previous year. These included French fries, soft bread, biscuits, muesli and porridge. This might suggest a downward trend, but EFSA hopes that things will become clearer in the coming years. On the other hand, instant coffee, ‘substitute coffee’ and potato crisps all showed a significant increase in acrylamide levels in 2008 compared with 2007.

As the EFSA report acknowledges, as yet there are no “mitigation measures” to reduce acrylamide in instant coffee and substitute coffee. But that doesn’t explain the apparent failure of some potato crisp manufacturers to make progress. They have their own dedicated CIAA toolbox leaflet, which anyone can download free from the web site.

This leaves me feeling a little puzzled. We have known about this issue for eight years now and learnt a huge amount about the science behind it. But we don’t seem to have made an awful lot of progress in actually reducing acrylamide levels in the foods that consumers buy. In fact, no one can be quite sure if we have made any progress at all. One could argue that the data should be made available a bit more quickly – why does it take nearly 18 months to publish figures for 2008? But even so, with all the effort that has been targeted at the problem, it seems odd that the acrylamide content in crisps is still going up, even though there are practical measures available to reduce it. One cannot help wondering whether some food manufacturers are dragging their feet. We are always being told to be proactive, but it is much easier in the short term to do nothing. I hope the Commission doesn’t lose patience waiting for the industry to get its act together and propose putting permitted limits on acrylamide in certain foods. There is an opportunity here to show that self-regulation can work in the food industry and it shouldn’t be wasted.

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