California lawsuit seeks to mash potato industry
California lawsuit seeks to mash potato industry
No sooner had the potato industry emerged victorious and vindicated from the attack of the now-discredited anti-carb diets than it came under attack from yet another quarter: this time a lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer against nine manufacturers of potato chips and french fries.
The lawsuit, according to a press release from Mr. Lockyer's office, "seeks a court order that will require the firms to warn consumers that some of their food products contain acrylamide, a chemical known by the state to cause cancer." This despite the fact that most researchers say there is no indication that the minute amounts of acrylamide present in those products pose any health risk.
Acrylamide is not added to foods but forms in small quantities in certain starchy foods, such as potatoes and grains, when they are cooked at high temperatures by such traditional cooking methods as baking, frying and roasting.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, acrylamide is believed to have been present in cooked foods for thousands of years. Acrylamide in food is not the result of contamination from environmental sources.
Laboratory studies have shown that when mice that are bred to be cancer-prone are subjected to massive doses of acrylamide, they develop tumors. Because of those studies, acrylamide has been on Californias Proposition 65 list of known carcinogens since 1990. But the presence of acrylamide in food was unknown until early 2002 when a team of Swedish researchers found that cooking can cause acrylamide formation in certain foods.
Numerous health organizations and medical research groups took a hard look at the issue and concluded that the amount of acrylamide found in cooked foods was too small to be of concern. But consumer activist groups saw things differently.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has had french fries, super-sized servings, fast-serve restaurants and agribusiness on its hit list for years before the results of the Swedish study were announced, jumped on the discovery and warned people of this new danger.
A previously unknown non-profit organization called the Committee for Education & Research on Toxics, represented by the law offices of Raphael Metzger in Long Beach, CA, promptly filed a lawsuit under Prop. 65, naming McDonalds and Burger King as defendants.
More recently, on Aug. 3, 2005, a lawsuit was filed by another previously unknown organization, Environmental World Watch, against the same nine defendants named in the California attorney generals suit.
Under the recently announced filing by Mr. Lockyer, the state of California is now taking over the prosecution of both cases.
Besides McDonalds and Burger King, the other defendants in the suit filed by Mr. Lockyer are Frito-Lay/Pepsico, H.J. Heinz Inc./Ore-Ida, KFC Corp., Procter & Gamble, Wendys International, Kettle Foods Inc. and Cape Cod Potato Chips.
The suit specifies civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each violation. With each bag of chips or fries sold constituting a separate offense, and assuming that each of Californias more than 30 million people made, on average, just one purchase a week of any of the offending products, damages awarded from civil suits could theoretically exceed $100 billion.
Any requirement to post a warning label on any potato product could have a potentially negative effect on overall potato sales. Even if the state does not prevail in the lawsuit, the potato industry could be adversely affected.
With the litigation pending against several of the potato industrys major customers, calls to the Idaho Potato Commission and the U.S. Potato Board were referred to the Grocery Manufacturers Association. GMA declined to comment on what legal responses may be under consideration but referred The Produce News to a wealth of information on the organizations web site regarding the science of acrylamide in foods.
In a release dated Aug. 29, GMA stated, It is regrettable that private individuals and the California attorney general have decided to file lawsuits seeking warnings on acrylamide in food notwithstanding the views to the contrary of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and health experts throughout the world.
Further, the release stated, Acrylamide is present in food as a natural byproduct of the cooking process. It has been present in the food supply and safely consumed since human beings discovered that cooked food tastes good and is often safer than the raw form.
Acrylamide is present in prunes, olives, baked potatoes, crackers, coffee, asparagus, cereals and many other foods that are part of a normal, healthy diet, the release stated. The FDA, the World Health Organization and numerous other health regulatory agencies and experts throughout the world & have concluded that the data do not warrant a change in diet due to the acrylamide content of foods much less a warning. Indeed, the FDA specifically warned that requiring a Proposition 65 warning on foods containing acrylamide could actually have adverse health consequences on the California public and is likely to misinform and mislead the public.
Acrylamide research is ongoing by a wide array of government, academic and industry scientists worldwide, and if, at some point, the data suggest that a different conclusion is warranted & we will be the first to act on it, the GMA release stated.
According to the American Council on Science & Health, Mr. Lockyers lawsuit is bogus. As reported in the Sept. 7 San Francisco Chronicle, the ACSH maintains that human cancer risk from dietary acrylamide cannot be assessed when based exclusively on high exposure in laboratory animals and that so far, no solid evidence has surfaced linking tiny amounts of this chemical to human cancer to justify what Lockyer wants.
The Montreal Gazette editorialized on Sept. 8, There is actually no evidence that acrylamide in normal quantities harms humans. The lab rats that developed tumors ate thousands of times more of the stuff than even the greediest humans could ever consume.
Reuters reported in July 2003 that a study conducted in Europe has failed to turn up an association between eating fried or baked potatoes and an increased risk of cancer. & The new study provides 'reassuring research evidence for the lack of an important association between consumption of fried and/or baked potatoes and cancer risk, according to the International Journal of Cancer. The study was conducted by the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche in Milan.
On July 10, the Center for Consumer Freedom submitted a brief to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services stating that the Center for Science in the Public Interest has purposefully and knowingly misled the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the American public with its flawed and deceptive petition regarding theoretical human cancer risks associated with dietary acrylamide.
According to the CCF brief, CSPI President Michael Jacobson made an unfounded and reckless claim that dietary acrylamide causes an estimated 8,900 cancers per year among Americans. Despite CSPIs insistence & there are in fact no reliable data linking acrylamide in food to a risk of cancer in human beings, the brief stated.
It noted further that a human being would have to consume over 180 pounds of french fries each day, for life, in order to approach the lowest level of risk observed in laboratory rats.
The brief further noted that CSPI acknowledges that it consciously manipulated government nutrition data in order to make its case.
BUPA, a British-based global health care organization, issued a release on March 23 stating that a study has shown that [acrylamide] in baked and fried foods does not increase the risk of breast cancer in women. & Earlier studies in people have already shown that acrylamide does not cause bladder, bowel or kidney cancer either. These findings suggest that the potential cancer risk from eating acrylamide-containing foods is very small.
The lawsuit, according to a press release from Mr. Lockyer's office, "seeks a court order that will require the firms to warn consumers that some of their food products contain acrylamide, a chemical known by the state to cause cancer." This despite the fact that most researchers say there is no indication that the minute amounts of acrylamide present in those products pose any health risk.
Acrylamide is not added to foods but forms in small quantities in certain starchy foods, such as potatoes and grains, when they are cooked at high temperatures by such traditional cooking methods as baking, frying and roasting.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, acrylamide is believed to have been present in cooked foods for thousands of years. Acrylamide in food is not the result of contamination from environmental sources.
Laboratory studies have shown that when mice that are bred to be cancer-prone are subjected to massive doses of acrylamide, they develop tumors. Because of those studies, acrylamide has been on Californias Proposition 65 list of known carcinogens since 1990. But the presence of acrylamide in food was unknown until early 2002 when a team of Swedish researchers found that cooking can cause acrylamide formation in certain foods.
Numerous health organizations and medical research groups took a hard look at the issue and concluded that the amount of acrylamide found in cooked foods was too small to be of concern. But consumer activist groups saw things differently.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has had french fries, super-sized servings, fast-serve restaurants and agribusiness on its hit list for years before the results of the Swedish study were announced, jumped on the discovery and warned people of this new danger.
A previously unknown non-profit organization called the Committee for Education & Research on Toxics, represented by the law offices of Raphael Metzger in Long Beach, CA, promptly filed a lawsuit under Prop. 65, naming McDonalds and Burger King as defendants.
More recently, on Aug. 3, 2005, a lawsuit was filed by another previously unknown organization, Environmental World Watch, against the same nine defendants named in the California attorney generals suit.
Under the recently announced filing by Mr. Lockyer, the state of California is now taking over the prosecution of both cases.
Besides McDonalds and Burger King, the other defendants in the suit filed by Mr. Lockyer are Frito-Lay/Pepsico, H.J. Heinz Inc./Ore-Ida, KFC Corp., Procter & Gamble, Wendys International, Kettle Foods Inc. and Cape Cod Potato Chips.
The suit specifies civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each violation. With each bag of chips or fries sold constituting a separate offense, and assuming that each of Californias more than 30 million people made, on average, just one purchase a week of any of the offending products, damages awarded from civil suits could theoretically exceed $100 billion.
Any requirement to post a warning label on any potato product could have a potentially negative effect on overall potato sales. Even if the state does not prevail in the lawsuit, the potato industry could be adversely affected.
With the litigation pending against several of the potato industrys major customers, calls to the Idaho Potato Commission and the U.S. Potato Board were referred to the Grocery Manufacturers Association. GMA declined to comment on what legal responses may be under consideration but referred The Produce News to a wealth of information on the organizations web site regarding the science of acrylamide in foods.
In a release dated Aug. 29, GMA stated, It is regrettable that private individuals and the California attorney general have decided to file lawsuits seeking warnings on acrylamide in food notwithstanding the views to the contrary of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and health experts throughout the world.
Further, the release stated, Acrylamide is present in food as a natural byproduct of the cooking process. It has been present in the food supply and safely consumed since human beings discovered that cooked food tastes good and is often safer than the raw form.
Acrylamide is present in prunes, olives, baked potatoes, crackers, coffee, asparagus, cereals and many other foods that are part of a normal, healthy diet, the release stated. The FDA, the World Health Organization and numerous other health regulatory agencies and experts throughout the world & have concluded that the data do not warrant a change in diet due to the acrylamide content of foods much less a warning. Indeed, the FDA specifically warned that requiring a Proposition 65 warning on foods containing acrylamide could actually have adverse health consequences on the California public and is likely to misinform and mislead the public.
Acrylamide research is ongoing by a wide array of government, academic and industry scientists worldwide, and if, at some point, the data suggest that a different conclusion is warranted & we will be the first to act on it, the GMA release stated.
According to the American Council on Science & Health, Mr. Lockyers lawsuit is bogus. As reported in the Sept. 7 San Francisco Chronicle, the ACSH maintains that human cancer risk from dietary acrylamide cannot be assessed when based exclusively on high exposure in laboratory animals and that so far, no solid evidence has surfaced linking tiny amounts of this chemical to human cancer to justify what Lockyer wants.
The Montreal Gazette editorialized on Sept. 8, There is actually no evidence that acrylamide in normal quantities harms humans. The lab rats that developed tumors ate thousands of times more of the stuff than even the greediest humans could ever consume.
Reuters reported in July 2003 that a study conducted in Europe has failed to turn up an association between eating fried or baked potatoes and an increased risk of cancer. & The new study provides 'reassuring research evidence for the lack of an important association between consumption of fried and/or baked potatoes and cancer risk, according to the International Journal of Cancer. The study was conducted by the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche in Milan.
On July 10, the Center for Consumer Freedom submitted a brief to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services stating that the Center for Science in the Public Interest has purposefully and knowingly misled the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the American public with its flawed and deceptive petition regarding theoretical human cancer risks associated with dietary acrylamide.
According to the CCF brief, CSPI President Michael Jacobson made an unfounded and reckless claim that dietary acrylamide causes an estimated 8,900 cancers per year among Americans. Despite CSPIs insistence & there are in fact no reliable data linking acrylamide in food to a risk of cancer in human beings, the brief stated.
It noted further that a human being would have to consume over 180 pounds of french fries each day, for life, in order to approach the lowest level of risk observed in laboratory rats.
The brief further noted that CSPI acknowledges that it consciously manipulated government nutrition data in order to make its case.
BUPA, a British-based global health care organization, issued a release on March 23 stating that a study has shown that [acrylamide] in baked and fried foods does not increase the risk of breast cancer in women. & Earlier studies in people have already shown that acrylamide does not cause bladder, bowel or kidney cancer either. These findings suggest that the potential cancer risk from eating acrylamide-containing foods is very small.
