Extreme Cuisine: As the lids come off barbecues across the land are people aware over-cooking is as dangerous as under-cooking? asks Haydn Shaugnessy
You may remember in the last Extreme Cuisine I suggested a competition that involved a gentleman's trousers and a potato.
In place of Mae West's memorable: "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me", readers had to come up with a similar line but faced instead with an aging Irishman with a potato bulging in his trousers.
One worthy entry came from Judith Flynn who hails from Co Waterford. "Is that a rooster in your pocket or are you just cock-a-hoop to see me."
It's an old gag but entirely fitting.
To continue the frivolous mood I wonder did anybody notice that the latest ingredients scare over in the UK involved Tesco's Healthy Living products? Is that an irony or a paradox? Perhaps an oxymoron.
The dodgy additive in the healthy food is Para Red. The UK Food Standards Agency says of it: "Although there is very limited data available, it would be prudent to assume that it could be a genotoxic carcinogen."
The term genotoxic is not in my dictionary but I presume it to have a meaning similar to mutagenic, that is its toxicity operates at the level of our DNA and causes mutations that replicate in their own new world. They are cancer's launch pad.
If you are a regular fan of Tesco's finest smoked duck paté with pear jelly or Tesco's Healthy Living Tikka Masala or Tesco Healthy Living Korma then the chances are you will have ingested some.
At least with Para Red Tesco and all the other shops caught out by a criminally-inclined dye supplier could claim they were unwitting victims. Supermarkets though sell food that has dire consequences for our health and do so deliberately and knowingly, everyday, and thousands of times.
Some lines of Tesco's Health Living products contain hydrogenated fats, an unnecessary poison that is killing tens of thousands of people in the western world (see below). Supervalu bread also contains it (most breads on the shop shelves now contain hydrogenated fat) as do many lines of biscuits and cakes.
We don't need supermarkets to poison us. We're quite capable of doing it for ourselves.
Barbecuing at high heat for long periods is one of the worst ways of cooking meat but the shops are filling up with barbecue sets and as yet I have not seen one that warns against over-cooking.
Cooking meat at high heat for long periods creates polycyclicaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the same kind of stuff that's getting into lakes and rivers because of jet skis and boats.
PAHs are known as endocrine disruptors. They are capable of changing the genetic material of cells (they too are mutagenic). In short they are carcinogens. Neither the fish nor we should ingest them. As summer arrives make a pledge to BBQ at low heat. Marinate meat first - it's been shown to reduce the production of harmful chemicals. Don't do a Tesco on yourself.
Heating our cooking oils is also a dangerous pastime that we engage in daily and witlessly. When you see a little blue smoke rising up from the olive oil in your pan, you are beginning the process of changing its structure. The longer the cooking at high
temperature the more damage is done. It creates acrylamide, one of the carcinogens that is also created when smoking a cigarette.
The Potency project at the University of California, Berkeley, is a database of products and ingredients known to be carcinogenic. The researchers note the public poorly understands that carcinogen-potential.
Estimates of a product's carcinogen potential are made by feeding the food to rats and observing tumour growth. Many carcinogen statements actually amount to an educated guess that if a food can induce cancer in a rat then at a different level it can do the same in humans.
Carcinogens are naturally occurring as well as the product of bad food preparation or chemicals. Caffeic acid found in coffee and furfural found in bread are also carcinogenic as is symphytine found in the health supplement Comfrey. Carcinogens are all around us but in general the potency is extremely low.
The same cannot be said for hydrogenated fats which, when not acting as a carcinogen, contribute to cardiovascular disease. Campaigns against their use are now up and running in Canada, the UK and the USA. To date though there's been barely any progress. This is one the food companies are winning. According to researchers at Harvard University, who point out that manufacturers have been increasing the hydrogenated-fat content in foods so that they can claim to be reducing saturated fats:
"By our most conservative estimate, replacement of partially hydrogenated fat in the US diet with natural unhydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent approximately 30,000 premature coronary deaths per year, and epidemiologic evidence suggests this number is closer to 100,0000 premature deaths annually."
For more on acrylamide www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/chem/acrylamide_faqs/en/index3.html
The Harvard Report can be found at: www.hsph.harvard.edu/reviews/transfats.html