3 ms·

Also things you probably shouldn’t eat all the time either.

• themoat 9y ago
  That fact seems tangential to his comment. Should carcinogenic warnings be on all those examples he mentioned? If no, why should it be on coffee? If yes, why isn't there legislation pushing for french fry warnings?
• mirimir 9y ago
  True enough. But I suspect that heating any food much over 100 °C will create carcinogens. Even cooking rice, if it browns at all by accident. And indeed, some folks cook at 50-70 °C to avoid that. Sprouted grain "bread" baked at ~50 °C is especially strange.
  • mywittyname 9y ago
    I was actually told this by a physics professor in college (in a class about science and public policy). He claimed that basically anything that is browned via heat becomes a carcinogen, so policy makers and scientific researchers have a moral obligation to ensure that "is known to cause cancer" remains a meaningful statement, because taken literally, it applies to almost anything.
    • mirimir 9y ago
      Right. You have acrylamide. Plus polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). But PAH, at least, get degraded quickly, and don't accumulate in fat, unlike similar halogenated compounds, which do. Arctic peoples are loaded with them, because they're transported north and condense out. Distillation, basically.