| Answer: | It isn' t. Frying has long been suspect, but so has meat charred or burnt by barbequeing. For some time it was thought that the main danger of frying and barbequeing was that fats, cooked at high temperatures, produce oxidants - powerful cancer-promoting chemicals. And of course frying can also mean more fat and more calories.
To add fuel to the fire, however, alarming research has found another cancer-promoting substance, acrylamide, in foods cooked at high temperatures, with or without fat. While the safe limit set for acrylamide in food is 10 parts per billion (ppb), chips and crisps have been found to contain more than 10 times this amount.
The worst foods are chips sold in fast-food outlets, crisps and crispbreads. Ryvita contains between 1,340 to 4,000ppb. According to UK research, Walker' s crisps average 1,250 and Pringles 1,480. In the US,McDonald' s French fries, followed by Burger King, come out worst. However, even home-cooked chips have been found to be high. Acrylamide is produced by frying, barbecuing, baking and even microwaving.
So, the honest answer is that anything browned or burnt, or cooked or processed using high heat, is likely to be bad for you. The bottom line is to eat more raw food and if you cook it, steam-fry or boil it rather than stir-fry. To steam-fry foods add a very small amount of olive oil to a pan and sauté the ingredients for literally a minute, just enough to generate enough heat so that you can then add a water-based sauce, such as equal amounts of soya sauce, lemon juice and water.
When you put on a lid, this liquid then steams the food. The result is hot food that' s full of flavour, but not full of oxidants or acrylamide because nothing is burnt. |
