There’s been a lot of news lately about the role fruits and vegetables (and let’s not forget chocolate) play in reducing health risks. We also did a story about how hot dogs and other nitrite-containing meats increase those same risk. Well, now we can add fried foods to the list of don’t-eats. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that men who regularly eat French fries, fried chicken, donuts, and other fried foods have a 30-37% higher risk of cancer than men who don’t.
Oh, and that cancer risk was higher regardless of the men’s age, race, family history of prostate cancer, body-mass index and screening history.
The major culprits are the length of time the food is being fried, the temperature of the oil, and whether the oil is reused. The deep frying itself appears to produce carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) in the food. And cooking foods at high heat seems to accelerate production of advanced glycation andproducts, which are associated with chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. Stanford and her colleagues Marni Stott-Miller and Marian Neuhouser note that A chicken breast deep fried for 20 minutes contains more than nine times the amount of advanced glycation endproducts as a chicken breast boiled for an hour.
There’s a bit of a dispute about what, exactly, “regular consumption” means. For a lot of people—especially in rural and inner-city communities—fried foods are a part of their diet nearly every day. But Janet L. Stanford, the lead researcher on the study, set the bar a lot lower. “The link between prostate cancer and select deep-fried foods appeared to be limited to the highest level of consumption — defined in our study as more than once a week — which suggests that regular consumption of deep-fried foods confers particular risk for developing prostate cancer.”
This research was published in the journal The Prostate.
