More On Acrylamide

More on Acrylamide. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Acrylamide. It occurs naturally in some foods when cooked at high temperatures. Food industries like the potato chip industry have been working on minimizing the amount of acrylamide formed even though it is safe at low levels. AJ Bussan, Assoc. Professor for Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison talks about those efforts.

BUSSAN: One of the efforts id to try to document and quantify the acrylamide levels in potato chips coming out of the chip potato plants and so the last 12 months part of the commercial screening trials that have been going on, these loads of potatoes that are being shipped to the potato plants...we take potatoes from the check that is running through the plant right in front of it and then we take samples from the new variety to see if there is a change in the acrylamide level.

Of course if everyone ate only raw potatoes there would not be an issue.

BUSSAN: The reason we cook them is they taste better after we cook them and they taste better because of the interaction of the amino acids in part and the reducing sugars so it’s actually an important part of the flavor process in what we’re doing as well. So the goal is trying to figure out where do we have to be in terms of asparagine level, glucose level, fructose level in raw product in order to get an end product that’s going to be the acrylamide goals that been established.

The FDA has stated that eating foods that contain acrylamide are not harmful to humans at the low levels present in cooked foods.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.