According to the new evening news, in the daily cooking process, it is inevitable to encounter the situation of food burning paste and roasting, if it is only a slight scorched paste, many people will still choose to continue to eat, but if the whole is scorched black, it will often directly throw away the entire food.
Of course, there are also a few people who like this feeling of burnt crispness, such as the baked sweet potatoes on the street, some people like to eat the charred part; when buying scones, they also like to bake a little, crispy and fragrant...
But the Internet is rumored, "Burnt food can not be eaten, it will cause cancer!" "What is the truth?
How many carcinogens are found in charred food?
For food, the success is also "temperature", and the defeat is also "temperature".
The right temperature can not only kill pathogenic bacteria and parasites in food, but also make the fiber softened, the anti-nutritional factors are reduced, the amino acids are dissolved, the taste is better, and many nutrients are easier to digest and absorb;
But when food is heated to too high a temperature, the vitamin C, B vitamins, and unsaturated fatty acids and other healthy components are destroyed, and some harmful substances may be generated, including carcinogens.
And at different temperatures, the carcinogens produced are different:
1, heated to 120 ° C, acrylamide (class 2A carcinogen) is coming to you
Foods containing carbohydrates and amino acids (such as potatoes, bread, steamed buns, etc.) are easily "Maillard reaction" after being cooked at a high temperature of more than 120 ° C.
This reaction has always been popular in the culinary world, because it can make food brown, while also producing furan, pyrazine, thiophene, thiazole and other aromatic substances, making people more appetizing. But in the process, there will also be some harmful by-products, the most important of which is acrylamide.
However, although acrylamide has a certain neurotoxic effect, and the amount of general foodborne acrylamide is not enough to be afraid of, as long as the frequency of eating is not too high, do not eat too much at a time, pay attention to eating with fresh vegetables and fruits, it is safe.
Tip: Fried, baked, high-starch foods contain relatively higher acrylamide. If you really care about foodborne acrylamide, it is recommended to eat less potato chips, fries, toast, fried potatoes, etc.
2, heated to 200 ° C, heterocyclic amines (class 1 carcinogens) beckoning to you
Protein-rich foods such as livestock and poultry meat and fish cooked at high temperatures and for a long time may produce heterocyclic amines. In general, foods that are heated at a higher temperature, longer, and have less moisture content produce more heterocyclic amines.
Studies have found that heterocyclic amines are carcinogenic and mutagenic, and are related to liver cancer, bowel cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and other cancers.
3. When heated to 300 °C, benzopyrene (Class 1 carcinogen) appears
The oil temperature is too high, especially above 300 ° C, which will cause thermal cracking reactions in lipids to produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds, the most notorious of which is "benzopyrene", which is a strong carcinogen. Moreover, the total amount of benzopyrene produced by the food when it is baked paste is much higher than when it is not baked.
It has been proven that long-term exposure to benzopyrene can not only cause lung cancer, but also cause gastrointestinal cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer and so on.
Therefore, whether the food has a carcinogenic risk, we can't just look at whether it is burned.
Is eating charred food necessarily cancerous?
Not necessarily.
The Japanese Cancer Research Association once did an experiment in which the scorched black food was directly fed to the hamsters, which could indeed induce liver cancer in hamsters, but if the food was roasted and mixed into the feed and then fed, even if it was fed for a lifetime (the hamster life span is about 2 years), the test did not find that the hamsters got cancer.
Just as the so-called "leaving the dose to talk about toxicity is a hooligan", so under the premise of following the principle of food diversification in the daily diet, eating a little charred food usually will not induce cancer.
Although it does not necessarily cause cancer, the nutrients in the burnt part of the food are almost completely destroyed, and there is no health benefit. Therefore, if you can eat less, you can eat less, and if you can eat without eating, don't eat.
How can daily cooking reduce the formation of harmful substances?
In addition to burnt food, in fact, the wrong operation during cooking will also quietly hurt the body, and even increase the risk of cancer! So here are some considerations to keep in mind:
1: Drain the water and then put it down
If the ingredients are not drained when stir-frying, they will burst violently at the moment of contact with the oil, vaporize quickly, and will become many fine particles, so that the value of PM2.5 may be higher than that of frying. Long-term inhalation of these fine particulate matter is likely to cause damage to the lungs and increase the risk of pneumonia and even lung cancer.
2: Heat the pan with cold oil
Many people like to wait for the oil to smoke and then put food, but when the oil pot smokes, the oil temperature is likely to have reached more than 200 ° C, at this time, the dish is put off the pot, not only will destroy the nutrition of the food, but also can make the protein, fat and carbohydrate in the food change, producing some carcinogens.
Therefore, when stir-frying, it is recommended to heat the pan with cold oil.
3. Tips for different cooking methods
It is best to choose steaming, boiling, mixing cooking, and when frying, frying, roasting, you must learn to master the tips to reduce harm:
(1) When stir-frying, fry the oil in a hot pan and stir-fry on high heat; before frying, you can also blanch the food until it is half cooked, reducing the time of high temperature cooking.
(2) Fried food, you can cook the food first, shorten the time of frying; you can also use the way of hanging paste to isolate some temperature; you should use fresh oil every time.
(3) When grilling, do not use open charcoal to bake, instead of electric roasting; wrap the food with tin foil to protect the food from "smoke and fire"; grilled food can be marinated with onions, ginger, garlic, lemon juice, etc., which can reduce the production of heterocyclic amines when grilling meat; cut the meat into small pieces, or cook the meat in advance to half-cooked, and a little roasting can be cooked, shortening the time of high temperature heating.
4. Brush the pot in time
It is also wrong to fry the next dish without brushing the pan!
Because the seemingly clean surface of the pot will be attached to the grease and food residues, when heated again at high temperatures, benzopyrene and other carcinogens may be produced; and when the pot is not brushed and then stir-fried, you will find that the food residues are easily scorched, which in turn increases the formation of carcinogens.
So after stir-frying a dish, be sure to brush the pot clean and fry the next dish.
5. The hood is turned on throughout the whole process
The fumes can contain more than 200 kinds of harmful substances such as benzopyrene, acrolein, heterocyclic amine compounds, etc., which are very harmful to health.
According to the survey, people who have been exposed to high temperature fumes in the kitchen for a long time have a 2 to 3 times higher probability of lung cancer than ordinary people; and for people who have respiratory diseases, such as asthma, pneumonia, etc., such harmful substances can also aggravate the disease.
Recommendation: Be sure to turn on the hood for stir-frying. After the end of the stir-fry, some of the fumes remain in the kitchen and pipes, so at the end of the stir-fry, try to keep the hood working for 3 to 5 minutes to ensure that harmful gases are fully discharged.