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2007-8-28 16:10:04 |
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Wednesday August 22, 2007 (Foodconsumer.org) - A new observational study of 100,000 women has found consumption of acrylamide, a chemical found in French fries and many other processed foods is not linked with elevated risk of breast cancer, according to a study presented Tuesday in Boston at the 234th national meeting of the American Chemical Society. The National Toxicology Program in 1991 listed acrylamide as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen in the Sixth Annual Report on Carcinogens, meaning that evidence is sufficient enough to claim that this chemical can cause cancer in animals, but not sufficient enough to say it's a human cancer-causing agent. The link between cancer and acrylamide in foods was first found by Swedish researchers in 2002, according to Wedmd.com. Later, the World Health Organization (WHO) considered acrylamide a probable human carcinogen. Acrylamide at high doses is known to promote cancer in rats and mice, but epidemiologic studies often resulted in negative associations between this chemical in diet and cancer. In previous epidemiological studies, Lorelei Mucci and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston failed to find any association between dietary acrylamide and colon, rectal, bladder, and kidney cancers. Their findings were consistent with many others. For instance, La Vecchia C and colleagues from Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, Milano, Italy re-analyzed data from an integrated network of Italian and Swiss hospital-based case-control studies and found small, yet insignificant associations between dietary acrylamide and a number of cancers including cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, large bowel, colon, rectal cancer, larynx, breast, ovary and prostate. They reported “the ORs for the highest versus the lowest quintile of acrylamide intake were 1.12 (95% CI = 0.76-1.66) for cancer of the oral cavity/pharynx, 1.10 (95% CI = 0.65-1.86) for esophageal, 0.97 (95% CI = 0.80-1.18) for colorectal, 1.23 (95% CI = 0.80-1.90) for laryngeal, 1.06 (95% CI = 0.88-1.28) for breast.? The results were published in the January 15, 2006 issue of International Journal of Cancer. In this present study of 100,000 U.S. women, Mucci and colleagues found no association between dietary acrylamide and risk of breast cancer. For the study, they followed up the participants for two decades starting in 1980 during which the women were surveyed for their dietary habits including the types of foods they ate and how often they ate, which served as a base for their calculation to estimate dietary intake of acrylamide in the participants. During the follow-up, 3,000 breast cancer cases were recorded. Cancer rates in two groups, one having high intake of acrylamide and the other with low intake, did not show a significant difference, the researchers found. Mucci suggested the reason why mice and rats got cancer after exposure to acrylamide is because they were given a dose that was 1000 to 100,000 times higher than those found in the human diet. Acrylamide is commonly formed in processed foods including fries, breads, cereals or even plum juice during thermal processing at high temperature, a scientist associated with foodconsumer.org said. He cautioned that the results of the study may involve errors and biases because the calculation of acrylamide intake was based on reports from the participants, who estimated, but did not measure what they ate and how much they ate. This means the study should have no final say about the effect of acrylamide on breast cancer risk. High levels of acrylamide tend to be formed in certain foods with low moisture and processed at high temperature. The color of the food may help consumers guess whether the food contains high levels of acrylamide. Foods with dark or brown color, meaning more exposure to thermal processing, may contain high levels of acrylamide. To check out the content of acrylamide in individual foods, refer to http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/acrydata.html |
