Cooking Up a Carcinogen

Should we worry about all that acrylamide in our diet?

Turns out that hamburgers have it. So do french fries, crackers, breakfast cereals, pizza, fried fish, cauliflower au gratin, minced chicken, cooked beets, potato pancakes, powdered chocolate, and coffee. It’s acrylamide. Though best known as a carcinogenic and neurotoxic building block of many plastics, scientists are now discovering it in more and more foods.