3 replies to this topic

[InquilineKea]

Roasting certainly seems to result in a lot more charred black marks - are those safe to eat? If you turn them into pure carbon, then (maybe) that means that even the AGEs got destroyed by the heat too...

[Mind]

It all depends upon the temperature. If you fry or roast to the point where your food turns black (no matter vegetable or meat) you are going to get some form of malformed nutrients. I fry and bake things at lower temperature in order to avoid these problems. And I mostly eat raw or near raw food. That being said, the real culprit is total calories. The closer you are to CR, the less you have to worry about such things. Total calories and amount of exercise seems to have a much larger effect on healthspan.

[niner]

I try to eat like Mind; raw or near raw. That's my ideal anyway. In reality, I eat more cooked things than raw things, but I shoot for low temperature cooking when possible. While CR will make the largest difference in lifespan of any interventions we have today, I wouldn't discount endogenous AGEs. I was pretty impressed by some mouse data looking at high AGE vs low AGE diets. I'm sorry I don't have a reference handy, but it almost surely came from the Vlassara lab. Dr. Vlassara has recently been talking up the value of tweaking your diet a bit to avoid the worst offenders (like grilled hot dogs). You can cut your AGE intake by a factor of three just by avoiding the really bad stuff; you don't have to be fully raw.

As for frying vs. roasting, it will depend on the water content and heat conductivity of the food, and temperature of the oven or oil. I don't think you can make a hard and fast rule. If part of the food is charred to the point of blackness, then things got pretty hot in that location. I don't think it's safe to assume that the AGEs were destroyed. Even if some of them were, there would be a zone around the black part where it got hot enough to make a lot of AGEs, but not quite hot enough to char.

[InquilineKea]

Thanks for the excellent replies.

I was primarily concerned about things like roasted fajitas (like those you can get from Chiptole's) - I prefer to fill my plate with as many veggies as possible, so I include the veggies that are roasted to blackness. It seems that acrylamides are more likely to form on foods that are high on starchy content (or on things high on protein content). That said, I wonder if it's possible that even cellulose in plant foods could be converted into AGEs?