Out of step?

In the last year or two, acrylamide has been raised as a possible significant health hazard. This chemical - which can cause cancer in laboratory animals at high dosage rates - is widely present in cooked food, particularly if they have been treated at high temperatures. Possible culprits include bread, crisps, chips and coffee. Today, one more piece of good news was reported (see Cooking chemical "no cancer risk" on the BBC news website, for example), where it is reported that Swedish scientists found no evidence of a link between dietary acrylamide and breast cancer. This now joins the list of other common cancers not caused by acrylamide in our food.

The story includes a very sensible and balanced quote:

'Henry Scowcroft, science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "Previous research has suggested that acrylamide can cause several types of cancer in animals, and several studies have shown that it is present in small amounts in baked and fried foods.

"However, the levels found in foods are miniscule compared to the amount that causes cancer in animals, and so several groups around the world have been looking at whether acrylamide in food is actually a health hazard."

He added: "We welcome the results of this study, which suggest that acrylamide in food has no effect on human breast cancer rates".'

Interestingly, the potential risk form acrylamide was not over-hyped and does not seem to have caused significant changes in eating habits among the worried well. Is this, perhaps, because it is "natural"? The reaction was in contrast to the recent Sudan 1 scare, where the story received high attention for a much longer time, almost certainly because this azo dye is synthetic and was present in "processed" foods, which have acquired an increasingly bad press. If bread isn't processed, I don't know what is, but the perception of ready meals is clearly different.

A paper in the latest edition of Science (Residential biofuels in South Asia: Carbonaceous Aerosol Emissions and Climate Impact;Ventakatarama et al; Science; Vol 307, 2005; pp 1454-56) should win an award for missing the point. Their finding is that soot from domestic cooking in rural India - using wood or cow dung as fuel - is a major contributor to the region's impact on climate change.

Only passing mention is made to cleaner cooking methods "yielding significant local local health and air quality benefits". However, indoor cooking with wood-burning stoves is known to be a serious health hazard. For example, in an article on the SciDev website covering the Science paper (Cooking with wood "contributes to climate change") it is reported that "According to the Intermediate Technology Development Group, indoor pollution caused by burning biofuels affects the health of hundreds of millions of people, and kills more children each year than malaria or HIV/AIDS. Among the diseases linked to stove use are pneumonia, lung cancer and respiratory tract infections."

It looks like the current fashion for guilt over supposed Man-made climate change has blinded some people to the very real and unnecessary suffering of fellow human beings, which could be eliminated at a fraction of the cost of complying with the Kyoto protocol. On the other hand, maybe this is a well-meaning attempt to fund a very worthwhile initiative on the back of climate change work. Who knows?