premise: There was considerable concern expressed by biochemists in 2002 when news emerged that traces of Acrylamide were found in a great many food stuffs, including daily basics such as bread, breakfast cereals and potato and cheese products. Acrylamide is widely found in many processed foods but it is also created during home cooking, in fact whenever sugar, found in so many foods, is heated and browns. Blood tests showed that it was present in high concentrations in the vast majority of people in the Western world. The few animal studies that had taken place suggested that Acrylamide is a carcinogen, but little was known about the toxicological consequences of ingesting the chemical daily and at the levels found in the general population. An urgent search began to establish what risk it posed to public health and how it might be removed from or reduced in food.
hypothesis: The author of the passage would most likely disagree that many of the questions posed in the passage are now close to being answered.