“Air fryers cause cancer.”
Air fryers have not been shown to cause cancer.
You do not need to give up your air fryer. It is just another way to brown food, and the browning chemical it makes is the same one found in toast, oven fries and roasted potatoes, which studies in people have not tied to cancer.
Keep using your air fryer, and cook potatoes and breads to golden rather than dark brown or burnt.
Air fryers make the same browning chemical, acrylamide, that ovens and deep fryers make, and large studies following more than a million people have not found a consistent link between acrylamide from food and cancer. Confidence is moderate because those studies are observational and food intake is hard to measure, and no study has looked at air fryers on their own.
Air fryers have not been shown to cause cancer. They form acrylamide in browned starchy foods the same way frying, roasting and baking do, and large studies in people have not found a consistent link between acrylamide in the diet and cancer.
Acrylamide forms when starchy foods like potatoes, bread and cereals are cooked at high heat, and it has probably always been in cooked food. Boiling and steaming do not usually form it. At high doses it causes cancer in lab rodents, which is why the U.S. National Toxicology Program lists it as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, but people absorb and process it differently. A 2022 review of 16 studies with more than 1.1 million adults, followed for a median of about 15 years, found no link between higher dietary acrylamide and any of the cancers studied, except lung cancer in smokers. A 2015 review of 32 reports found no meaningful link for most cancers, with only a borderline result for kidney cancer. In one 2023 lab test, fries from an air fryer, a deep fryer and an oven had similar, low acrylamide levels, and soaking the cut potatoes first lowered them.
- National Cancer Institute. Acrylamide and Cancer Risk. Reviewed December 5, 2017
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Acrylamide Questions and Answers. Content current as of 03/05/2024
- Filippini T, Halldorsson TI, Capitão C, Martins R, Giannakou K, Hogervorst J, Vinceti M, Åkesson A, Leander K, Katsonouri A, Santos O, Virgolino A, Laguzzi F. Dietary Acrylamide Exposure and Risk of Site-Specific Cancer: A Systematic Review and Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Epidemiological Studies. Frontiers in Nutrition. 2022;9:875607. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2022.875607. PMID: 35548558
- Pelucchi C, Bosetti C, Galeone C, La Vecchia C. Dietary acrylamide and cancer risk: an updated meta-analysis. International Journal of Cancer. 2015;136(12):2912-2922. DOI: 10.1002/ijc.29339. PMID: 25403648
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