How might I go about reducing the amount of Advanced Glycation End Products (AGE’s) in my diet? So far I’m unable to find anything online that lists the AGE contents of various foods.
If I understand the Maillard reaction correctly, both proteins/amino acids and sugars need to be present along with heat to form AGE’s, and the quantity produced increases with increased temperature and with decreased moisture content. Is the Maillard reaction what people are referring to when they talk about “caramelizing” or “browning” during cooking? Is color alone a reliable indicator of AGE concentration?
Yes. I did a great Maillard synthesis last night. Baked ham with coca cola - molasses marinate…mmmm
This is the browning, roasting, caramelisation process in cooking.
Why would you want to reduce glycosylamines?
ps on the subject of Maillard rxn and molasses, there was a case a few years ago in a sugar refinery in South America where there was a run-away Maillard reaction (it is exothermic) in a molassess tank. This caused a fair bit of damage AIRecall.
Thank you, antechinus. The reason I asked is because I’m diabetic, and I recently read about this study, which implicates dietary AGE’s in the nerve, artery, and kidney damage that is common in diabetics.
You’re not likely to find anything on the glycation end product content of foods because they increase dramatically during cooking. As you have figured out, the Maillard reaction is the same reaction that leads to browning when you cook proteins and sugars together. The browner things get, the more AGE’s. However, not all glycation products are brown, so you can’t just avoid the brown stuff. The reaction is also irreversible, so there’s no simple way to “cleanse” the AGE’s from the body. Ingested AGE’s probably don’t get incorporated into any biomolecules where they could cause trouble. Biosynthesis after all has evolved mechanisms to minimize such substitution errors.
In the human body, one of the major contributors to glycation product formation is high blood sugar. Keeping down the sugar decreases the rate of glycation. Since the reaction is irreversible, many systems, such as tendons or crystallin in the eye, will suffer cumulative damage from repeated episodes of high blood sugar.
While this review article focuses primarily on atherosclerosis, it gives pretty good coverage of the variables that affect physiological AGE production.