Cinnaban

Food police

Hamlet would have another reason to be depressed if he were alive today: European Union regulations are threatening the existence of a popular Danish pastry.

At the root of the controversy is the delicious bark scraping we know as cinnamon. In Denmark, a popular pastry called kanelsnegle is loaded with the spice-too much of it, according to the European Union.

A chemical found within cinnamon can be toxic in large doses to certain people. The E.U. set a maximum amount of this chemical that can exist in food, and the Danes' delights are over the line. Now bakers are being ordered to cut back the cinnamon content in their rolls.

Ikhlas Khan, a pharmacology expert at the University of Mississippi who has studied the toxicity of the chemical found in cinnamon, told NPR only a small percentage of people have a negative reaction to it, and these people would have to eat a lot of cinnamon, daily, in order to suffer harm. Furthermore, any negative effects are completely reversible once discovered.