Facing acrylamide head-on: experts tell you how to respond positively!

At the end of August, CommonHealth Magazine published its "2015 Major Survey of Brown Sugar Ingredients," and at the press conference it ran a huge headline stating: "Random Testing of Retail Brown Sugar: All Samples Found to Contain the Carcinogen Acrylamide". For a time, consumers fell into a panic over brown sugar and brown sugar-related products, and all kinds of brown sugar products went unsold. Whether large factories or small farmers, not a single producer of brown sugar escaped this storm.

As the brown sugar storm hit, the number of searches on internet search engines for the keyword "brown sugar" was far higher than for "acrylamide," which shows that the public's concern about "can brown sugar be eaten" is also far higher than any interest in understanding acrylamide, while overlooking the fact that acrylamide, because of the way cooking is done, is commonly present in our everyday foods or food products, and that children face higher risk than adults.

Even after more than a week, the panic effect triggered by the "brown sugar storm" still lingers, while conflicting accounts about the impact of acrylamide have once again left the public confused. To address this, reporters from NewsMarket separately consulted experts in food science and technology, risk assessment and food processing to discuss how we should understand and squarely face the impact of acrylamide.

Although experts in different fields have differing views on the carcinogenic risk of acrylamide, they also coincidentally agree that the public should calmly view brown sugar and indeed everyday foods, pay attention to intake and a balanced diet, and need not panic.

The series is divided into three articles, which are:

Exclusive Interview with Ye An-yi, Professor at the Graduate Institute of Food Science and Technology, National Taiwan University

No Need to Panic Over Brown Sugar; Note That Children Take In More Acrylamide Than Adults

The key factors determining how much acrylamide is produced in brown sugar are "heating time," "temperature" and "acidity." This is because during the boiling and concentration process, the pH value of sugarcane juice becomes more and more acidic, and because sucrose in an acidic environment is easily transformed and broken down into glucose and fructose, among which fructose is the fastest of all sugars to undergo the Maillard reaction. Therefore, as soon as sugarcane juice is heated past the threshold of transformation, the formation of acrylamide accelerates.

If the pH value can be controlled when boiling sugarcane juice, keeping it in as neutral an environment as possible, the formation of acrylamide can be greatly reduced.

Full interview text - https://www.newsmarket.com.tw/blog/75582/