Sudan 1. Be afraid, be very afraid - not.

Day off today. Been relaxing by experimenting in the kitchen and kicking back. Breakfast in bed of coffee, bacon, sausage, scrambled egg and buckwheat pancakes. I had to get out of bed to cook it but what the hell, Mrs Sticker was appreciative.

I’ve had a nice day, It’s been sunny most of the time, if cold and breezy. Even the stepkids have been chilled. Dog managed to get himself muddier than a hippo in its favourite wallow. Took an hour to get him clean (ish) again. Cooked three varieties of chips with Turkey & broccoli for Sunday lunch (Sweet potato, parsnip and potato – kids completely demolished everything.). Of such small things is happiness constructed.

Just to satisfy my curiosity I had a surf, trying to get some facts on this Sudan 1 food scare and dug up the following gems in the Observer, Telegraph and a few other scientific study web sites.

What it all boils down to is;

1. Sudan 1 is a genotoxic carcinogen, which can permanently alter the DNA in, say, a human liver cell.
2. The last study linking Sudan 1 to cancerous tumours was done in America 20 years ago.
3. Rats and mice were fed 30mg of Sudan 1 for each kilogram of their bodyweight every day for two years, the rats underwent changes that indicated they were possibly developing tumours. The mice showed no such pre cancerous changes.
4. The study has never been replicated because when the International Agency for Research on Cancer looked at the data, it decided it was not ‘robust’ enough to categorise Sudan 1 as a likely cause of cancer.
5. The risk of getting cancer from Sudan 1 contaminated food products can be likened to smoking one cigarette in your entire lifetime.
6. If a man weighing 80kg (12½ stone), were to replicate the effects from the amount given to the rats, he would have to consume 2.4 grams of the Sudan 1 dye a day to match the dose. This means he would have to drink around 800 litres of Worcester sauce every day for two years. That's an awful lot of sauce.
   

Am I scared? Er….. Not really. Acrylamide in fried foods is far more likely to kick off a tumour. Stopped eating chips yet? Oo er, I don’t think so. These food scares are only gimmicks to sell newspapers.

Any old road up. Do you want to live forever?