Cooking methods may be causing cancer
By Brian Palmer, Slate
Grilling meats is an American tradition, but it’s not the healthiest thing to do. A growing body of research suggests that cooking meats over a flame is linked to cancer. Combusting wood, gas, or charcoal emits chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Exposure to these so-called PAHs is known to cause skin, liver, stomach, and several other types of cancer in lab animals. Epidemiological studies link occupational exposure to PAHs to cancer in humans. When PAHs from a flame mingle with nitrogen, say from a slab of meat, they can form nitrated PAHs, or NPAHs. NPAHs are even more carcinogenic than PAHs in laboratory experiments. The reasonable conclusion is that grilling meat may be hazardous to your health.
The evidence linking cancer to cooking meat over a combustion source has been accumulating for decades. Epidemiologists first noticed a connection between the consumption of smoked foods and stomach cancer in the 1960s. Japan, Russia, and Eastern Europe, where smoking is a popular way to preserve meat and fish, became laboratories for gastric cancer research. Newer studies suggest that eating smoked meats may lead to cancer even outside the gastrointestinal tract. A 2012 study, for example, linked smoked meat consumption with breast cancer.
In subsequent decades, it has become clear that smoking isn’t the only problematic cooking method. Frying bacon, for example, produces significant levels of PAHs, probably due to volatilization of carbon in the bacon itself. An Iranian study published last year found that people who develop certain kinds of gastrointestinal cancers are more likely to have a diet high in fried rather than boiled foods. (The researchers linked level of browning to cancer incidence, thus reducing the likelihood that oil consumption was the culprit.) The FDA and WHO also remain concerned about the presence in food of acrylamides, a known carcinogen that forms from sugar and amino acids when cooked at high temperatures. Long-term studies are currently under way. The worrying implication is that cooking foods at high heat, even without active combustion, may be dangerous.
Life; it’ll kill ya.
You can be certain that people for centuries have been concerned with cooking meats over open flames – they wanted to ensure that all the micro organisms in the meat they had killed were dead, or else they would be.
I’m sure there’s also a link between grilling meat over an open flame and Global Warming. That article should be popping up soon.
LIFE IS A GAMBLE ,you win sometimes ,you loose all the time, Seems like everyone has Cancer ,
I’ve always said, “My goal is not to LIVE LONG, but to LIVE LIFE”. BBQ on Super Bowl Sunday!
Although this won’t be the Global Warming article A.B. says will “pop up”, it is known that ‘cooking’ is subject to the laws of thermal dynamics, as combustible fire breaks down certain molecules (softening the texture) that we would not easily digest if we didn’t. . .as omnivores (not just carnivores), we then learned though “trial & error” over millennia to combine flavors to make some things even more attractive than they might have been to some. . .
For example, we people didn’t even keep much track of what was being cooked in what amounts until before the French Revolution (i.e., “that was good, what did it have in there that was different than last time we had it ?”) before that, they just threw whatever they had together. . .
“But sometime in the 1760s, the merchant class of Paris developed a taste for healthy light broths known as restoratives, or restaurants.
By the 1780s, this new Parisian “health food” craze led to a handful of reputable dining halls, where customers could sit at individual tables and choose from a wide range of dishes.”
But it was the legendary Escoffier, about 100 years later, who did the most to ‘codify’ cooking, such as the recipes for the 5 “mother” sauces, and such ‘codifying’ allows the same meal to be done again & again. . .
Mr.Palmer’s article probably refers to the ‘searing’ of meat, which creates the intense black (but tasty) crust which carbonizes meat, but which is in fact carcinogenic.
‘Everything in moderation’, too much of anything is toxic. . .