One less "carcinogen" to worry about

For years activists have warned about the danger of Acrylamide in food. Now reported in Health Day. "data are accumulating, and it appears that acrylamide in the diet does not appear to be an important breast cancer risk factor," said study author Lorelei Mucci, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. "We probably couldn't rule out that eating very high levels of acrylamide is associated with a very, very small increase in risk, but in terms of it being an important public health risk factor for breast cancer I don't think acrylamide is a major risk factor," she said. Acrylamide is classified as a "probable" human carcinogen but only based on earlier animal studies in which the animals were exposed to levels of acrylamide up to 100,000 times higher than that normally consumed through foods.