Researchers at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany have concluded that acrylamide formed in coffee when it is roasted is not a risk to human health.
As highlighted in the September 2014 issue of C&CI (see pages 28-29), the European Food Safety Agency recently stated that acrylamide potentially increases the risk of cancer – an assertion which is disputed by the industry.
Epidemiologic evidence suggests coffee consumption to be associated with reduced risk due to certain non-communicable diseases, including diabetes type 2, Parkinson, and cardiovascular disease or various types of cancer. Human intervention studies using coffees rich in green bean constituents and/or roast products revealed that coffee consumption is associated with markedly reduced total DNA strand breaks in white blood cells, protection against DNA damage induced by activated forms of chemical carcinogens and reduction of spontaneous DNA strand breaks in white blood cells, supposed to reflect DNA lesions resulting from exposure to endogenous and/or exogenous DNA damaging agents.
However, as the researchers pointed out, in addition to constituents exerting such beneficial health effects, the roasting process also leads to generation of ‘genotoxic’ contaminants, as exemplified by heat induced formation of acrylamide from asparagine. Coffee is thought to contribute substantially to human exposure to acrylamide, thus making a benefit/risk assessment with respect to DNA protective/damage desirable.
The German researchers noted that coffee actually has many beneficial health effects, and they concluded in their results that the totality of evidence does not support the premise that acrylamide exposure from coffee is associated with significantly increased risk of DNA damage, especially if human background DNA damage is taken into consideration.
“In contrast,” they said, “regular coffee consumption contributes to maintaining DNA integrity and is associated with further beneficial health effects.”
