Dietary Acrylamide: A Detailed Review on Formation, Detection, Mitigation, and Its Health Impacts

In today's fast-paced world, people increasingly rely on a variety of processed foods due to their busy lifestyles. The enhanced flavors, vibrant colors, and ease of accessibility at reasonable prices have made ready-to-eat foods the easiest and simplest choice to satiate hunger, especially those that undergo thermal processing. However, these foods often contain an unsaturated amide called 'Acrylamide', known by its chemical name 2-propenamide, which is a contaminant formed when a carbohydrate- or protein-rich food product is thermally processed at more than 120 °C through methods like frying, baking, or roasting. Consuming foods with elevated levels of acrylamide can induce harmful toxicity such as neurotoxicity, hepatoxicity, cardiovascular toxicity, reproductive toxicity, and prenatal and postnatal toxicity. This review delves into the major pathways and factors influencing acrylamide formation in food, discusses its adverse effects on human health, and explores recent techniques for the detection and mitigation of acrylamide in food. This review could be of interest to a wide audience in the food industry that manufactures processed foods. A multi-faceted strategy is necessary to identify and resolve the factors responsible for the browning of food, ensure safety standards, and preserve essential food quality traits.

Towards a consensus LC-MS/MS method for the determination of acrylamide in food that prevents overestimation due to interferences

Acrylamide is prone to misquantification, and critical steps in the analytical procedures need to be identified and controlled to ensure a reliable determination. Four methods were considered to illustrate misquantification issues with acrylamide. For two methods varying by the extent of their sample preparations, cases of overestimation in cocoa samples reaching up to a 20-fold factor are shown. A second example, applied to a variety of food products, includes two other methods varying by their chromatographic conditions. As a follow up of a study conducted in 2020 about the identification of N-acetyl-ß-alanine as an interference of acrylamide in coffee, the extent of this interference was evaluated in a selection of coffee samples, cereal-based products and baby foods. The ultimate objective of this manuscript was to resolve such cases of misquantification and validate a wide scope and robust method allowing an interference free acrylamide analysis. To do so, an extraction procedure based on the EN 16618:2015 standard with water extraction and two consecutive solid phase extraction (SPE) steps was applied with modified liquid chromatographic conditions. The method was validated in coffee, cereals, baby foods, cocoa and pet foods with excellent performance in terms of recovery (97-108%) and precision (RSD_r and RSD_iR <12 %). The breath of scope was further proved through trueness determination in quality control materials and reference materials including French fries, potato crisps, vegetable crisps, instant coffee, infant food and biscuit (cookie), with trueness values found within a 94-107% range.