It was responsible for one of the biggest food scares in recent times. Now acrylamide, which is found in coffee, French fries and many other foods, has been cleared of causing breast cancer.
The alarm was raised in 2002 when researchers discovered that acrylamide, which had been shown to cause cancers in animals, can form in a range of foods while they are being cooked. A team led by Lorelei Mucci at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston has now sounded the all-clear 鈥� at least for breast cancer 鈥� following a 20-year study of 100,000 nurses in the US.
Although 3000 of the women developed breast cancer, questionnaires revealed that their risk was not affected by the amount of acrylamide-rich food they had consumed. 鈥淎t levels in the diet, it doesn鈥檛 seem to cause breast cancer,鈥� says Mucci, who presented her results at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston earlier this week.
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