Secular Trends in Food Acrylamide

Acrylamide is a monomer that can form in heated starchy food as a result of the Maillard reaction. The adverse effects of acrylamide in humans are neurotoxicity and carcinogenicity. The aim of this chapter is to present secular trends in food acrylamide in Europe, between 2002 and 2011, on the basis of the review of analyses performed by various authors, and derived from available databases and own data. The analysis of tendencies of changes in acrylamide levels in food based on the four different datasets demonstrates the decrease of acrylamide levels in a few categories of food and the increase in others. It shows that there are no constant and firm trends across food groups. Also, it should be emphasized that still a very high content of acrylamide is found in single samples of food products. This leads to the conclusion that the mitigation strategies used voluntarily by food manufacturers are ineffective or are not fully implemented as they do not result in decreasing the tendency in all categories of food.