Life & Style | Food
Grill goes out
Grilling and other high-heat cooking methods accelerate ageing and several serious health conditions.
- By Delthia Ricks, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
- Published: 00:00 May 18, 2007
Even as grilling remains very popular, medical experts have managed the scientific equivalent of pouring cold water on a pile of fiery briquettes: Grilling and other high-heat cooking methods accelerate ageing and several serious health conditions.
How food is cooked turns out to be important, says Helen Vlassara, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, US.
New class of toxins
She investigated a relatively new class of toxins called glycation end products, or AGEs, which develop during cooking, particularly when grilling, frying and flame-broiling.
"The highest levels are found in fried chicken, or broiled or grilled meats," Vlassara says.
AGEs, she says, tend to accumulate in the body and have been associated with diabetes and insulin imbalances.
She also sees a link between the compounds and ageing, Alzheimer's disease, inflammatory disorders, vascular problems and kidney conditions. In addition to frying and cooking, she theorises that AGEs may also be produced during pasteurisation.
Over the years, AGEs build up in the body, Vlassara says, causing damage by rogue oxygen molecules and increasing the likelihood of inflammation, which underlies a host of medical conditions from arthritis to heart disease.
Sustained inflammation damages the kidneys, joints, blood vessels, heart and brain, she says.
Writing in the Journal of Gerontology, Vlassara described her analysis, which involved testing blood levels of AGEs in 172 test subjects. Men and women were divided into two age groups, those 18 to 45 and those 60 to 80. Older people were likely to have higher levels of AGEs.
Boiling, stewing and poaching are methods that avoid production of AGEs, she says.
Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Centre, says AGEs are to be taken seriously.
Food chemistry
"People have to realise that cooking is a chemistry project," Connolly-Schoonen says.
"There are a lot of chemical changes that occur to our food as we cook it. Negative compounds are produced when food is exposed to heat as a result of the sugars in the food, the fat in the food and the protein."
Rashmi Sinha, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, says grilling and frying produce a variety of compounds that can damage DNA, and possibly pave the way to cancer development.
Sinha has been studying a DNA-damaging chemical called PhIP, a compound that is produced from the amino acids and creatinine in meats when they are cooked at high heat.
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