‘Killer spuds’ cancer warning sparks risk row

‘If you want to stay healthy, don’t brown your toast’ advised the front page of The Times yesterday. ‘Cancer risk in crispy roast potatoes’ warned The Express. ‘YOU’VE HAD YOUR CHIPS’ declared The Sun in three-inch block capitals, before explaining: ‘boffins link fries to cancer — pizza, toast are killers too’.

The increasingly alarming headlines were all thanks to new guidelines by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the UK, which were launched yesterday. They relate to a chemical called acrylamide which is released when starchy foods like toast, potatoes and doughnuts are cooked for too long at high temperatures. The more brown the foods become, the more acrylamide is present. And high levels of the chemical have been found to cause cancer in mice — so scientists believe there could be a risk for humans too.

That does not mean you should swear off roast dinners for life, says the FSA. But you should try not to brown your starchy foods; instead you should ‘go for gold’.

There is just one problem. So far, says Cancer Research UK, there is no strong evidence linking acrylamide and cancer. For one thing, studies with mice are not the same as studies with people. And while the chemical is officially listed as a ‘probable carcinogen’, most people do not consume enough for it to have an effect; it would take 320 slices of burnt toast a day to really be at risk.

In light of all this, telling people it causes cancer is ‘a dumb thing to say’, said the celebrity chef Raymond Blanc. Or, as a Cambridge professor put it, ‘many things in life may increase risk, but it’s the size of the risk that makes it important.’

By the end of the day, many of the same newspapers which had warned against burnt toast in the morning were explaining why it was okay after all.

Hot potato

Starchy foods may not be as bad as smoking cigarettes, says the FSA, but scientists still think there is a small risk to overcooking them — and they have a duty to tell people that. They never said that anyone should give up potatoes, just that they should cook them carefully to be on the safe side. This is why scientists do this kind of research in the first place: to find out the facts, and let people make informed decisions about their health.

Enough, say the campaign’s critics. Don’t we have enough to worry about without adding potatoes to the list? Red wine, chocolate, kale — it feels like every other day, there is another study giving dubious advice about what we should or should not eat to stay healthy. All these reports just end up confusing people or scaring them for no reason. Worse still, they reduce the impact of genuine scientific food advice: all you need is a balanced diet .