Avoid crunchy toast and crispy potatoes in home cooking, food experts warn

[Northerner]

Crispy potatoes and crunchy toast may be one of the most enjoyable ways to get your fill of carbohydrates, but according to a new report by the UK’s food safety body, a preference for having your starchy foods ‘well done’ could be posing some serious health risks.

While it’s long been known that over-cooking can make some foods carcinogenic, the new study from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) goes into new levels of detail on the dangers posed by acrylamide – a dangerous chemical substance that forms when starchy foods are cooked – and looks at how consumers can avoid creating it in the kitchen.

Acrylamide, which can lead to cancer and damage to the nervous and reproductive systems, isn’t a chemical that’s added to food during manufacturing or farming processes – rather, it’s a totally natural by-product of cooking, formed during a chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars. This reaction, called the Maillard reaction, often occurs when foods with high starch content are cooked at high temperatures, including frying, roasting, and baking.

http://www.sciencealert.com/avoid-c...py-potatoes-in-home-cooking-food-experts-warn

 

[trophywench]

Enjoy your meals - soggy toast for brekkie, soggy roasties with lunch and quite probably floppy pizza for dinner (No I wouldn't have all 3 in one day)

Why don't they go down the Soylent route right now if we aren't to enjoy any food we eat, we may just as well merely take a pill. And at least we'd have Green days to look forward to ........

 

[pottersusan]

That must be where I went wrong... I do like a slice of thickly buttered charcoal (what other people call burnt toast!)

 

[robert@fm]

As the saying goes, if you avoid everything that's supposed to be bad for you, you will starve to death. 🙄

 

[Northerner]

That must be where I went wrong... I do like a slice of thickly buttered charcoal (what other people call burnt toast!)

We were told as children that burnt toast would 'make your hair curl' - are parents nowadays telling children that burnt toast will 'give you cancer'? 😱 🙄

 

[pottersusan]

I thought it was the crusts that make your hair curl. It's taken 60 years, but it's worked😛

 

[Northerner]

I thought it was the crusts that make your hair curl. It's taken 60 years, but it's worked😛

As I recall, there were lots of 'reasons' parents would give to make fussy kids eat things! Obviously, I ate them all!

 

[Robin]

Ha! Love the photo. It was definitely burnt toast for curly hair in our household, (though I think we were let off lightly, because my hair is dead straight). Along with the sound of scraping for moderately burnt toast, I remember my mother throwing the seriously burnt bits out for the birds, and my father proclaiming that it would make their feathers curl, but I never saw any evidence. That was probably the start of the slow realisation that what parents tell you doesn't always stack up!

 

[trophywench]

WE had to eat it - never any spare bread in our house - we weren't brought up to eat a lot of it at all. 3 small tin loaves a week between 4 of us. It was ONLY crusts that made you hair curl. Nothing else.

However at the tender age of 48, shacked up with a new lover - I said to his eldest GD one day - Aren't you going to eat your crusts? And she replied No, she didn't like them. And added 'And don't tell me they'll make my hair curl - that's just a lie that grown-ups tell you!' to which I replied 'I can't argue with that Sarah, because you are right - it never worked on mine either!'

 

[Annette]

We never had to be told to eat our crusts in our house. We preferred them to the soggy bit in the middle...