Baby food, biscuits and crisps linked to cancer: FSA
Tests by the Food Standards Agency on best-selling brands of baby food, biscuits and crisps reveal raised levels of the chemical acrylamide in the products, which can trigger DNA mutations and cancer. Products on the FSA's list include Cow & Gate, McVitie's, Fox's biscuits, Kettle Chips and Burts crisps. This follows a health alert on 23 January about the risks of eating roast potatoes and burnt toast.
Tests on best-selling crisps, biscuits and baby food showed raised levels of a chemical linked to cancer.

The health alert comes just 24 hours after an official watchdog warned of the risks of eating burnt toast and roast potatoes.

The latest products on the danger list include Kettle Chips, Burts crisps, Hovis, Fox’s biscuits, Kenco coffee, McVitie’s and products from Cow & Gate.

A number of big name brand products contain raised levels of acrylamide, a chemical linked to cancer, according to the Food Standards Agency

According to the Food Standards Agency, 25 products have raised levels of acrylamide.

Animal studies suggest the chemical can trigger DNA mutations and cancer.

The link to acrylamide was also behind the warning over fried, roasted and toasted foods such as potatoes and bread.

The agency cautioned that any risk to humans related to lifetime consumption and not occasional eating.

However a renowned statistician yesterday insisted the link to cancer in humans from acrylamide was extremely weak.

‘There is no good evidence of harm from humans consuming acrylamide in their diet,’ said Professor David Spiegelhalter.

The FSA and other watchdogs in Europe test supermarket food to assess whether acrylamide levels are above a suggested limit – IV, for indicative value.

Of 526 products in targeted tests in 2014 and 2015, 25 had raised levels. Although the agency is not advising consumers to stop eating the products, the manufacturers have been told to cut the levels.

The FSA said: ‘For all of these samples we followed up with the manufacturers or brand owners via local authority inspectors.

'They alerted them to the findings and requested information about what is being done to control acrylamide in those products.

'We would emphasise though that the indicative values are not legal maximum limits nor are they safety levels.

'They are performance indicators and designed to promote best practice in controlling acrylamide levels.’

A Hovis granary loaf, pictured, is one of the products that has higher levels of the chemical, which has been known to cause DNA mutations in animals

Carte Noire and McCoy's crisps were also among some of the UK's favourite brands to feature on the list

Helen Munday of the Food and Drink Federation, which speaks for the manufacturers, said: ‘Food companies have been lowering acrylamide in UK-made products for years.

‘The FSA report provides a useful snapshot of acrylamide levels in a wide range of foods.

'At the time of surveying these products, up to three years ago in some cases, any individual foods found to contain levels of acrylamide above indicative values would have prompted a review by both FSA and the brand owner.

‘UK food manufacturers have been working with supply chain partners, regulators and other bodies, at home and abroad, to lower acrylamide levels for years.

‘To continue to make progress, the food and drink industry, in partnership with the European Commission, has developed detailed codes of practice.’

Cow & Gate said: ‘We take food safety extremely seriously and have been working hard to reduce acrylamide levels.

'In fact, in 2015 we took the decision to discontinue Sunny Start Baby Wheat Flakes as we were unable to reduce the level sufficiently.’

The statement said a spaghetti bolognese failure was expected to be a ‘one-off result’.

Cow & Gate, whose Sunny Start wheat flakes were on the list, said it was 'working hard to reduce acrylamide levels'

M&S said all the products highlighted in the research had since been shown to have low levels of the chemical.

Acrylamide has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as ‘probably carcinogenic in humans’ and the World Health Organisation has concluded that exposure to the chemical in food ‘indicates a human health concern’.

Professor Spiegelhalter said: ‘Adults with the highest consumption of acrylamide could consume 160 times as much and still only be at a level that toxicologists think unlikely to cause increased tumours in mice.

‘People may just consider this yet another scare story from scientists, and lead them to dismiss truly important warnings about, say, the harms from obesity.

'To be honest, I am not convinced it is appropriate to launch a public campaign on this basis.’

However Steve Wearne, the FSA’s policy director, said: ‘All age groups have more acrylamide in their diet than we would ideally want.

'As a general rule of thumb when roasting or toasting, people should aim for a golden yellow colour, possibly a bit lighter, when cooking starchy foods like potatoes.’

These are scare stories of an attention seeking quango, writes JOHN NAISH

Why is the Food Standards Agency so keen to frighten us off crispy roasties and toast that is well done?

Apparently because of a potential cancer risk from acrylamide, a chemical that is created by cooking starchy foods at high temperatures – the longer and hotter such foods are cooked the more acrylamide forms.

But hang on, what does potential risk mean here? All sorts of chemicals might potentially cause cancer, but the risks are so small and vague that no one can tell either way.

The experts at Cancer Research UK say that the evidence for any link between acrylamide from burnt food and cancer is at best only weak and inconsistent.

It comes after burnt toast was included in an alert by the FSA as reported by the Mail yesterday

And here’s the clincher: the charity points out that: ‘Even food industry workers, who are exposed to twice as much acrylamide as other people, do not have higher rates of cancer.’

As a health correspondent of 25 years’ standing, that’s good enough for me and my toaster.

So why would the FSA apparently want to scare people unnecessarily? Well, it makes people think that the FSA is doing something useful to protect our health.

After its initial announcement, the FSA not-so-helpfully clarified that it wasn’t telling people to avoid roast potatoes altogether – just to make them aware of the risk and how to reduce it.

On a section of its website devoted to its latest campaign, it advised people to ‘check for cooking instructions on the pack and follow carefully when frying or oven-cooking packaged food products such as chips, roast potatoes and parsnips.

This ensures that you aren’t cooking starchy foods for too long or at temperatures which are too high’.

To call this mere window-dressing would be an insult to the nation’s window-dressers, as they do indeed perform a useful job.

For such pointless cancer scaremongering on the FSA’s part only distracts people from the real and preventable risks of cancer, such as smoking, being overweight and drinking heavily.

The agency is charged with protecting the nation from dangerous food. But offering worthless, patronising advice is a less challenging task than protecting the public against contaminated, diseased, fake or dirty foodstuffs.

It has past form on patronising warnings. Among them was its ‘Your Fridge is Your Friend’ campaign, which aimed to nudge us about food safety at home, yet treated us like a nation of dunderheads.

Before you go shopping, check what’s in the fridge or freezer,’ was one piece of advice. ‘Make a list of what you need to buy,’ said another.

This could be comical, but such stunts only mask the fact that the Food Standards Agency is sadly unfit for purpose.

The agency was set up by the Blair government in 2000, in the wake of the salmonella and BSE disasters.

It was supposed to be a tough watchdog that would make safety scares a thing of the past, by protecting us from food poisoning, ensuring we know what goes into the food we buy, and policing the hygiene standards of restaurants.

But in early 2013, its inability to perform this most basic public-protection task was exposed when the horsemeat scandal broke.

Safety tests conducted by the Irish government revealed widespread adulteration of beef burgers with horsemeat. It warned the FSA. Caught on the hop, the FSA then asked suppliers to conduct their own tests.

These revealed, among other things, that the ‘beef’ in frozen lasagne and spaghetti bolognese made for Tesco, Aldi and Findus was up to 100 per cent horse.

In the wake of the scandal, Christopher Elliott, the director of the Institute of Global Food Security, was asked to examine how the FSA should pull its socks up.

He recommended that the agency set up a food crime unit, with a special department dedicated to using investigative powers to punish offenders counterfeiting foods such as meat, honey and wine.

In 2015, Professor Elliott complained that the FSA had failed to create the special department. The FSA says it is still considering the matter.

As a result, the agency has a food crime unit – which costs £2million a year to run – but it does not have a department to investigate or convict offenders.

This might help to explain why its work has not resulted in any prosecutions.

Potatoes that have been roasted too long were also included on the warning list

The FSA says the unit has been fully operational only for the past nine months and is working on a number of criminal investigations.

‘In that time it has focused on building links with sources of information in order to better understand the nature and scale of the food crime threat,’ a spokesman told reporters last month.

Professor Elliott is unimpressed and told a parliamentary inquiry into food fraud that: ‘We are quite far behind a number of other European countries in relation to thinking about the scale of food crime and food fraud.’

Meanwhile, there is bafflement about the agency’s food protection policies. The most likely place you will see an FSA logo is on the food-hygiene ratings posted on a restaurant’s doors.

But in England, restaurants and takeaways with awful hygiene ratings – such as only one star or no stars at all (meaning urgent improvement is required to address dreadful cleanliness) – don’t actually have to put the sticker up.

They can just ignore the rating and trust you won’t notice. What’s more, a zero hygiene rating does not automatically mean public health officials will issue enforcement notices – or that the business will have to close down.

It’s hard not to conclude that the FSA apparently prefers to fret over toast, rather than enforcing hygiene measures that would improve our health – and potentially save lives.