Not only is grilling not the same thing as frying, grilling meat can actually reduce the fat content, if it runs off of the meat onto the griddle. This is especially true if you’re using a grill with channels for the fat to run off, like a Foreman grill.
I paid my way through college partly by making Philadelphia cheesesteaks in the student union, and everyone in Philadelphia knows those are greasy, but what a lot of folks don’t realize is that the grease comes almost entirely from the cheese, not from the meat.
Oh, on the lung cancer risk, last I heard smoking is by far the dominant risk factor for lung cancer, so it would make sense to find the figures for risk from fried food both for smokers and nonsmokers.
Can we please annotate this discussion with the fact that fats are not necessarily unhealthy, and in fact are needed in the diet to a very small degree for proper nutrition (there are three fatty acids the body requires from the diet) – it’s merely that nearly every Western cuisine provides more than adequate fat, often to the point of unhealthiness?
As noted by dracoi, this depends on the type of fat. Trans fats are not necessary, and are necessarily unhealthy. Similarly, though evidence surrounding saturated fats is not entirely equivocal, most current recommendations lean towards minimal consumption.
I think any time you cook any food all the way to black, you add carcinogens.
The char on char-broiled anything, the black edge of overdone toast, the burned gunk stuck to the bottom of boiled out pot of coffee, all are bad for you.
When you fry onions or hash browns in oil the black crust is bad for you.
But what this thread seems to be saying is that it’s bad to breathe these things. Eating it may not be so bad.
And now that I think about it, it’s not too surprising. I have a window fan in the kitchen, and after a number of months it gets covered in this thick, disgusting layer of a grease-like substance that is almost impossible to wash off (it doesn’t dissolve in soap at all, only acetone). And of course, the lungs don’t have much protection against such things. The stomach, though, is much more robust.
Sorry, I should have expressed the point more clearly. A doubling of mortality rate per 100,000 per annum would be expected in contrasting two subsets of an average population split into people who stir-fry and people who do not (with all other considerations being equal). Your c. 5.6% chance of dying of lung cancer as an average American male, applies to you as an individual across your lifetime. Doubling this risk has a non-negligible effect on your expected cause of death.
PAHs are bad both to inhale (i.e. increase risk of lung cancer), and to eat (oesophageal, colon, rectum and stomach cancer), alongside certain non digestive types (breast, pancreatic and low urinary tract cancers).
Yes, but what I’m saying is that I’d like to see those corrections. I doubt that the risk from smoking is independent of the risk from PAHs, which would mean that PAHs wouldn’t pose the same amount of risk to a smoker as to a nonsmoker, nor the same risk to either as to the general population. As a nonsmoker, I’d like to see the nonsmoker figure, not the general population figure.
In which case you’ll have to pony up the cash to read the methods of statistical correction. If you’re a student then use your university access to do so.
To be fair, I’ve provided numerous sources and linked materials examining the odds ratios (ORs) for a whole variety of neoplastic diseases affected by PAH exposure, and the numerical levels that various foods and cooking methods will expose you too. I’ve applied these answer to the absolute risk of developing certain of these conditions from the most recent literature. I’ve also provided advice concerning the best methods to mitigate these risks for those concerned, which you yourself profess not to be.
Chronos was interested in finding out how these risk factors applied specifically to non-smokers, which isn’t detailed in the available abstracts. Having done some further searching however, I have found that the Bosetti et al. (2002) study is available in full (.pdf). From this, it is possible to compare the risks of Italian and Swiss, smokers and non-smokers in developing laryngeal cancer.
The study found that a non-smoker has, per additional serving of fried beef/veal per week, a 1.15 OR (95% CI) of developing laryngeal cancer. A smoker has a comparatively higher OR of 1.67. Similarly where fried fish/shellfish is involved, ORs differ between 1.74 and 3.05, for non-smokers and smokers respectively. Additionally,
I’m sorry I don’t have vast amounts of spare money with which to purchase scientific journal articles, but I have done my best to answer the questions raised in a discipline in which I’m not enormously versed. Since Chronos’ profile lists him as a student it occurred to me that he could well have free access to the research. I’ve gone well beyond my own interest in the subject, and spent some time researching, in order to try and answer peoples’ further questions. I’m not entirely sure why you think I would knowingly withhold data of interest, given the material I have provided.
I think another problem with fried foods is the problem off all good foods–we tend to overeat them. “How much” is as big of a health factor as “what”, and even slightly increased consumption builds up over the years: if you eat 5% more at each meal because it’s so good, that will have a non-trivial impact on your health over the years (i.e., 2100 calories a day instead of 2000 = 36,500 extra calories a year = 10 pounds).