So many people love BBQ and for years we’ve been told that grilling and roasting foods is the healthier cooking method. But is it?
Researchers at Mount Sinai University say not so fast.
They’ve found that roasting and grilling meats may increase the risk for diabetes and insulin resistance.
The culprit is not so much roasting or grilling but what happens to food when it is cooked over a dry heat. It creates a compound called methyl-glyoxal (MG) and that compound has been linked to insulin resistance and weight gain.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at two groups of mice, with one group fed a diet high in MG and the other group not given MG.
The mice given the MG began showing signs of insulin resistance and added bodyfat. The non-MG ingesting mice showed neither conditions.
The study’s Professor Helen Vlassara noted, “This was a prolonged but rewarding study showing that a specific AGE compound (from MG) abundant in foods, within only a few generations in mouse terms, contributes to the increase in weight gain, insulin resistance, and, diabetes, reproducing the pattern seen increasingly in humans over the last decades. These key findings should inform how we understand and prevent the human epidemic of obesity and diabetes. The study demonstrates how the prolonged ingestion of seemingly innocuous substances common in human food, such as MG, can reduce defenses and compromise native resistance to metabolic and other diseases.”