High-heat cooking: overlooked danger

Posted on Wed, 16 Nov 16

The burden of heart disease in different populations is not completely explained by current ideas. But there may be a cultural explanation: cooking at high temperatures.    

Various hypothesis have been proposed to explain uniquely high susceptibility to heart disease noticed in some people. These include the thrifty gene, insulin resistance, and related evolutionary explanations. However, these still fail to explain the burden of heart disease. 

A new idea might help solve the riddle and it’s not evolutionary, it’s cultural. Based on the idea that the way we prepare food may be just as important as what we eat, a research group recently formulated the “the high-heat food preparation hypothesis.” 

"...the way we prepare food may be just as important as what we eat."

They propose that cooking foods at high heat, namely frying and roasting techniques that use high temperatures, could explain the high heart disease risk seen in some groups and not explained by other factors. To test their idea they contrasted the diets of South Asians, who have a four times greater risk of heart disease than the general population, with relatively low risk Chinese. 

Reviewing the science they make a strong case. High heat cooking results in production of neo-formed contaminants (NFCs) such as trans-fatty acids (TFAs) and advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). And contrasting the diets of Chinese that cook with low heat methods, such as steaming, stir-frying and soups they found that the consumption of NFCs is typically much higher than south Asians which fry and roast more frequently. 

“NFCs produce biochemical and microanatomic alterations enhancing the effects of traditional coronary heart disease risk factors,” stated the study authors. “This phenomenon (high-heat food preparation hypothesis) is responsible for the increased risk for CHD in South Asians compared with other populations that use low-heat cooking,” they propose. 

Essentially this means it is not just what you eat, but how you prepare it that is important. Or another way of looking at is that you can take healthy food and make it unhealthy by cooking at high heat.  

Here are some tips to reduce your dietary AGE

Reference:

Kakde S, Bhopal RS, Bhardwaj S, Misra A. Urbanized South Asians' susceptibility to coronary heart disease: The high-heat food preparation hypothesis. Nutrition. 2016 Jul 26. pii: S0899-9007(16)30126-5.