If you just had to wait an hour for that hamburger at a barbecue, you get a blackened hunk of meat on your plate. Can you still eat it, or is that too unhealthy, so it’s better to put it in the trash? How bad is burnt food for you?
Crispy crust on your food turns soot
When you put a sausage on the barbecue, it absorbs the heat from the glowing coals. This heat ensures that the sausage itself heats up and cooks, killing bacteria. In addition, the heat provides the delicious crispy crust via the so-called Maillard reaction.
If the sausage is left too long, or if the barbecue is too hot, the sausage will not be able to absorb the heat properly. Then the carbon in the sausage burns, creating carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The carbon dioxide escapes as a gas into the air and the carbon monoxide (CO) remains on the piece of food. A wide range of other unhealthy substances stick to these tiny burned carbon particles and together they form the black layer, which we call soot.
Soot particles cause diseases
Soot is carcinogenic. In fact, in the late 18th century, pioneering health scientist Percival Potts noticed that so many young chimney sweeps were battling testicular cancer. He was the first to show that cancer can be caused by carcinogenic substances in the environment of patients, in this case the soot in chimneys.
When the chimney sweeps started wearing protective clothing, the number of cancer patients in the profession fell sharply. Even today, soot is high on the list of harmful substances. Soot particles in the air, for example, can penetrate through your lungs into your bloodstream and thus cause cardiovascular disease and cancer. In short, soot is something you don’t want to be around, let alone eat.
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Gobble, scrape or scrape?
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What makes burnt food so bad for your health?
So what exactly is in the black scorch layer that is so bad for us? Many, but mainly three things. First, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and in particular the substance benzopyrene. That is also in cigarette smoke and the fumes from wood stoves. So be careful.
In addition, you will also find a lot of acrylamide in soot, another carcinogenic substance. This is also present in fried and baked food, just too little to care for bumblebees. But if you push burgers covered with soot inside, the amount of acrylamide can become disastrous.
Finally, soot is chock full of so-called heterocyclic amines. Those were once proteins that were given a much too high temperature for their teeth. A chemical reaction took place, in which the proteins changed into this carcinogen, which you often find on the outside of burnt food.
It is impossible to say exactly how unhealthy a bite of soot is. No scientist has ever let a few thousand people eat soot alone for a month. What we do know for sure is that soot is loaded with carcinogens, so the less you get, the better.
Cancer-free cooking
4 tips for the least cancer-causing barbecue or cooking experience:
- Avoid a blackened pork chop by only throwing the piece of meat on the barbecue when the flames no longer come out, turning it regularly.
- You can also ingest the harmful substances by standing in the smoke of a barbecue, for example, so try to avoid this smoke. The bonus advantage is that you don’t smell like ashtray for the rest of the day.
- Of course you don’t feel like eating just a scoop from that bucket of Russian salad, so are you served a piece of chicken that is only partially black? Then peel off the black pieces. The same goes for bread from the toaster. A little black can be scraped off. Pitch black = throw away.
- To avoid burning when cooking in a pan with oil: press the handle of a wooden ladle onto the bottom of the pan, into the oil. If bubbles form around the wood, the oil is hot enough to push the food into the pan. Do not heat the oil any further, because then you risk burning!
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