Acrylamide could cause cancer

Acrylamide is an ingredient found in many potato chips such as Frito-Lay brand. This cancer causing chemical is found in a lot of foods and there is a lot of evidence it does cause cancer. I wrote the other day about John Kanzius and his Kanzius machine which may be able to cure cancer. One of the comments I received on this post suggested that it would be much better to prevent cancer than to try and cure it. I totally agree with this ascertation and its true we should be doing more to try and prevent cancer in humans.

Banning Acrylamide in our foods is just one way we can help to prevent cancer in people. Of course personally I don’t care a lot for potato chips as they have no nutritional value. Frito-Lay recently settled a lawsuit where they agree to reduce the amount of the cancer causing ingredient acrylamide in their products. This seems strange to me. If there is evidence that acrylamide causes cancer then why just reduce it, why not totally eliminate it. Our government is working on all sorts of legislation about how to limit stuff we know is bad for you. Cigarettes cause cancer so the government has passed laws taxing the product immensely and has went even as far as to ban cigarettes in many public places. But while someone can not smoke in these areas they can eat a bag of potato chips which contain acrylamide and will probably cause cancer in you just as fast as smoking does.

The settlement by Frito-Lay and other potato chip manufacturers agreed to reduce the amount of acrylamide and pay $600,000 in penalties. One person could spend $600K trying to survive cancer so this does not seem to be a valid amount to pay for killing people. Perhaps I’m just dense and don’t understand the legal system. I always though the legal system was supposed to create a sense of fairness and provide appropriate penalties for crimes against humanity, but I guess I’m mistaken.

Yes I do believe that if you kill people in the name of making money then you are a criminal and should pay the same as someone who decides to rob someone of their money and commits a murder at the same time. There is really no difference in my eyes. The only difference with this acrylamide settlement is the potato chip companies are killing a lot more than just one person and they continue to make money off their crimes.

Back to the cancer discussion from the John Kanzius post, Perhaps the prevention of cancer is for us to not eat these types of foods. I’m not a scientist and I’m not an expert in this area, but it appears to me that we have a lot more instances of cancer than what was present in the 1940’s. Now perhaps this is because in the forties there was not as advanced medical facilities and its quite possible many cases of cancer where never diagnosed. I’m not even sure if the disease of cancer was even discovered in the 1940’s but that is not pertinent for this illustration. All we have to realize is cancer is more prevalent now that it was years ago. As our society has evolved people have started to eat more and more processed foods. We all go to McDonalds( also serves acrylamide in their products) or eat out of the vending machines since we are all so busy, when years ago we went home to eat, we ate vegetables that where grown in our on garden or that we bought from the farmer’s market or local roadside stand. We did not consume all the chemicals that are put in our food today. Perhaps our growth as a society is exactly what is going to be our downfall.

Just some thoughts about acrylaminde and cancer in general. I would love to hear your comments am I totally off base here or is this a possible cause of the widespread cancer facing our society.

 

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