Can eating burnt food cause cancer?

It is very unlikely that eating things like burnt toast will increase your cancer risk.

If bread and potatoes have been cooked for a long time, the chemical can be found in them.It can be found in biscuits and coffee.

It is true that what you eat can affect our cancer risk, but you can reduce it by eating a healthy balanced diet.This is one with more fruits and vegetables and foods high in fibre, like brown varieties of bread, rice and pasta, and eating less red and processed meat and high calories foods like crisps, chips and biscuits.

Many cancer myths, including eating burnt foods, have not been proven to cause cancer.There are things you can do to reduce your risk of cancer.

In order to shape our health information, we review and evaluate new research into the causes of cancer.There are some things we look out for when evaluating a new study.

Was the study looking at people or animals?Studies in animals and cells can help scientists understand the basics of cancer, but they can't duplicate how humans work.

Studies in people can show with more certainty how something affects the risk of cancer in humans.Smoking and drinking are two factors that could affect someone's cancer risk.

How many people were in the study?Results are more likely to happen by chance in studies involving only a few people.Studies that only follow people for a short time can miss long-term effects.We look at studies that follow hundreds or thousands of people for a long time because we can be sure of their results.

It is important to know if a study was published in a journal and carried out by scientists who work for a university.Other experts who were not involved in the study will check the findings before they are published in a journal.

We give more weight to the most rigorous scientific studies when evaluating any new study because some studies show conflicting results.