Hello and welcome back to the weekly wrap-up from The Bunker.

I'm Jacob Jarvis. Every Friday we recap the biggest stories, the weirdest stories and the news that has gone under the radar

over the last week with some of your favourite bunker personalities, maybe even some panellists

from, oh god, what now. Today, I'm joined by the Leeds Westminster editor Zoe Greenwald. Hi, Zoe.

Hello. So what's the strangest story you've seen this week? So this is a genuinely

quite surreal one.

Scientists in the UK have been busy creating a gene-edited wheat designed to make burnt toast less carcinogenic.

Okay.

You might think maybe we just don't need to burn toast.

And you would be right.

Basically, they've produced this gene editing, which cuts levels of something called asparogen,

which is the compound that turns into a sort of carcinogenic compound when bread is toasted.

The result is that up to 90% less of the chemical in bread and biscuits, even when browned.

And this kind of comes after a longstanding anxiety we've had about if you burn

things, they might become carcinogenic, which could be potentially linked to cancer. However,

the twist is that there's actually no strong evidence that this is a real cancer, risk in humans,

experts, including at Cancer Research UK, said that you'd only need to eat extreme amounts of burnt

toast or burnt products for this to matter. So it's a little bit like when people are worried about Diet Coke, but it's like you'd have to drink 3,000 cans or whatever for a too much for an issue. Yes. And, you know, there are other ways to eat toast. You can eat it unburned perhaps. Yeah. It's kind of like we're using... what level of toast is deemed to be burnt. Yeah. And that's quite a philosophical question for us, I guess.

It is. It just seems to me that we've essentially used cutting edge gene editing to solve a problem that really probably didn't need to be solved in the first place. It's like I really want to defend the scientists doing lots of stuff and then occasionally

you think you're not making it easy for me, guys.

Yeah.

Oh, well.

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