It wouldn’t be crazy to give up grilled, smoked, or fried food
slate.com
slate.com
Giving up grilled, smoked, and fried meats seems equally bizarre today, but population-wide changes in dietary staples have dramatically affected cancer rates in other parts of the world.
OK, good so far, we're going to get a case that illustrates why grilled food is bad.
In the early 1970s, liver cancer killed nearly one in 10 adults in Qidong, China, a region located at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Two factors contributed to the astonishingly high prevalence: widespread infection with Hepatitis B, and food contaminated with aflatoxin.
Aflatoxin? OK. Known carcinogen. But how potent compared to the result of grilling?
The soil in Qidong didn’t support rice cultivation, so the population relied on corn. Growing and storage conditions encouraged the growth of a mold that produced the potent carcinogen.
That sounds VERY bad. Bad enough to show a large regional difference in outcomes.
When food trade between regions opened up, the residents of Qidong largely switched to rice. By the late 1980s, exposure to aflatoxin in the area had dropped more than a hundredfold, and the liver cancer rate has halved.
So a 100X normal exposure to aflatoxin doubled liver cancer. This leaves me puzzled. I'm not searing a hunk of red meat over wood every meal. Both the red meat and the open flame are probably a Bad Idea. But how much do I have to do that to move the outcome by a measurable amount? At what point does it matter more than simply eating less? Or eating less processed food?
If you are grilling your meat, you at least bought some meat, and perhaps other unprocessed ingredients of a meal, instead of some processed concoction. Is this a first world foodie problem?
/thread