The full text of this Opinion article, Food Science and Technology Today 14 .2, 59-61, is given here by kind permission of the Editor of FSTT and of the authors. Tom Addiscott leads the Soil Science Modelling Group at IACR-Rothamsted, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 2JQ, UK, and is a visiting professor at the University of East London.
Health scares are a mixed blessing.
Some, like the concern about excessive salt in the diet, can be life-savers. The theory that nitrate causes stomach cancer was based on possibilities rather than hard evidence. This nitrite could react in the stomach with secondary amines released in the digestion of protein to produce carcinogenic N-nitrosamines, which could cause stomach cancer. The nitrate-stomach cancer theory suggested they should have had more. If you go to such a factory, you can taste ammonium nitrate in your saliva within a minute or two of arriving, so if anyone was to have an enhanced risk of stomach cancer from nitrate, it was the workers in that factory.