Fried food is one of the traditional foods in our country, whether it is fried dough sticks, fried spring rolls and fried meatballs on holidays, or fried dough sticks, oil cakes and noodle nests eaten for breakfast every morning; In recent years, French fries, fried bread, potato chips and fried biscuits among children's favorite snacks are all fried foods. Fried food is deeply loved by many adults and children because of its crispy and delicious flavor and stimulating appetite. However, eating fried food often is extremely harmful to health.
The Ministry of Health published the report "Risk Assessment of Acrylamide in Food" to remind residents to change their eating habits of fried and high-fat foods. California requires nine fast food restaurants such as McDonald's and KFC to indicate the acrylamide content in their French fries and chips with warning labels.
Composition of fried food
Acrylamide is a small molecular organic compound with simple structure, and its pure product is a transparent crystalline solid. Soluble in water, easy to polymerize at melting point, and can also polymerize under ultraviolet light. Solid acrylamide is stable at room temperature, and it will react violently when it is hot-melted or in contact with oxidant. Starch food is easy to produce acrylamide when cooked at high temperature (> 120℃), and its content increases with the increase of processing temperature. At the same time, related experiments also found that the acrylamide content in foods with high starch content is high, while the acrylamide content in foods with high protein content is relatively low.
Acrylamide is a moderately toxic substance, which has certain irritation to eyes and skin, can be absorbed through skin, respiratory tract and digestive tract, and partially accumulates in the body, mainly affecting the nervous system. One-time high-dose intake will cause the function of central nervous system, especially the function of brain, which is manifested as cerebral hemorrhage. Epidemiological observation of occupational contact population shows that people who ingest small doses of acrylamide for a long time will have symptoms such as drowsiness, mood swings, memory loss, hallucinations and tremors, and may be poisoned or accompanied by peripheral neuropathy (such as sweating and myasthenia). Neuropathy has a certain incubation period, which depends on the dose. Low-dose contact lasting for several weeks can lead to disease; Long-term low-dose exposure will lead to disease in a few years. Related animal experiments have confirmed that high acrylamide content makes animals suffer from reproductive system cancer.
The harm of fried food
Eating fried food often is easy to cause cancer, because fried food is easy to produce nitrite after high temperature treatment, and fried food is not easy to digest and greasy, which is easy to cause stomach problems. Fried food is high in calories, oil and oxidant, which can easily lead to obesity if eaten frequently. It is a dangerous food that leads to hyperlipidemia and coronary heart disease. No matter the nutrition of vitamins A and E in oil is destroyed at high temperature, the nutritional value of oil is greatly reduced, and a large number of carcinogens are produced only during frying. Studies have shown that the incidence of certain cancers is much higher for people who often eat fried food than for people who don't eat fried food or seldom eat it.