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News

Sixty seconds on . . . burnt toast

BMJ 2017; 356 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j365 (Published 25 January 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;356:j365
  1. Anne Gulland
  1. London

What is this? Good Housekeeping magazine?

I’ve got some bad news: burnt toast may give you cancer.

Now, I feel like I’m reading the Daily Mail. What are you talking about?

The Food Standards Agency has launched a campaign warning people not to overcook bread, potatoes, and other starchy food as this produces a chemical called acrylamide that has been linked to cancer.1

Holy smoke! What does the agency mean by overcooking?

The chemical is produced only when baking, frying, toasting, or roasting, in what is known as the Maillard reaction. Cooks should aim for their food to be a golden yellow, not dark brown. “Go for Gold” is the agency’s snappy slogan.

Never a frown with golden brown roasties, then?

It depends how you cook them, and they should be more golden than brown. The method for cooking roast potatoes favoured by many cooks, parboiling then shaking the potatoes to fluff them up, increases the surface area and therefore the amount of acrylamide that forms.

What else do I need to know about these killer spuds?

Don’t store raw potatoes in the fridge, as it leads to a process called cold sweetening. This increases the amount of acrylamide produced in cooking.

So where are all the studies backing up these warnings?

Unfortunately, there are only studies in animals at the moment. But because the cancer causing mechanism is the same in animals as it is in humans the agency is assuming that the risk is the same.

So toast is, er, toast?

Not really. The eminently reasonable people at the agency are not telling people to avoid certain foods. “Moderation and variation” are the key watchwords. The level of risk is not high, but it’s “higher than we are comfortable with,” said one of its spokespeople.

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