Figure/vision china
□ Zhang Zhaomin
Fried food tastes crisp and smells pleasant, and is loved by many people. But people are always worried that the oil content of fried food is too high, which is not good for health.
The air fryer became hot, and many friends used it to fry French fries, bake egg tarts and bake sweet potatoes … … Because it can be used to heat food, it is said that it can be used without oil, which not only satisfies our appetite, but also has certain benefits to our health (at least reducing oil intake). One of the selling points of air fryer is that "nothing fried is healthier".
At this time, however, there is another sound: the food fried by the air fryer will cause cancer.
Is it true?/You don’t say. You must really want to know about it.
How can an air fryer "fry" food without oil?
When cooking food, we usually use heating methods, including direct heating and indirect heating. The common way in life is indirect heating, which completes heat transfer through heat transfer medium, thus heating food until it is cooked. Traditional fried food is to heat the oil first, then soak the food in hot oil, and also fry the food by heat conduction.
The principle of air fryer is that food is placed in a closed small space, air is used as a heat transfer medium, and the air in the space is heated, supplemented by a fan to accelerate the flow of gas, take away water vapor, and form a circulating hot air, which mainly "explodes" food by convection. When using an air fryer to "fry" some ingredients with very little oil content, the instructions remind us that it is best to put a little cooking oil on the food. In this way, the hot air in the air frying pan may be mixed with some small oil droplets, forming the effect of oil mist, and the color of the "fried" food is also very uniform and beautiful.
Using microwave oven, it is more difficult to achieve this effect similar to fried food. Microwave ovens mainly use electromagnetic energy to heat food in the oven. When the food is placed in the microwave oven, the microwave will make the water molecules in the food reciprocate at high frequency, resulting in "internal friction" effect and thermal effect. Therefore, the food processed by microwave oven is often heated at the same time, both inside and outside.
However, both traditional frying and air fryer use heat to transfer from the outside to the inside, which inevitably forms a "temperature gradient" (that is, temperature difference) inside and outside the food, so it can form the effect of tender outside. Even the microwave oven with hot air convection heating function is difficult to achieve the same effect.
Don’t worry that the food made by air fryer will cause cancer.
Air fryer also uses high temperature to heat food, so some physical and chemical changes will also occur in the cooking process of food, such as texture improvement and special flavor. This process may naturally produce some chemical components that are harmful to human body, such as acrylamide.
Acrylamide is indeed a carcinogen, which has been listed as Class 2A carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. This kind of carcinogen is mainly based on the carcinogenicity data of experimental animals, but it is likely to be carcinogenic to human body.
There are several ways to produce acrylamide in food, and the main way is Maillard reaction between asparagine and reducing sugar, which actually occurs in many food processing processes.
Some scholars in our country have studied nearly 350 kinds of food on the market. The results show that acrylamide can be detected in most food samples, but its average exposure (intake) in our diet is relatively low. Therefore, there is no need to worry too much about the statement that the food made by the air fryer will cause cancer.
Using air fryer is mainly to replace the traditional way of frying food. On the one hand, it can avoid eating too much oil, on the other hand, it can reduce other potentially harmful polymers produced by eating oil during high-temperature frying.
Oil-free cooking is really healthier
People who pursue oil-free cooking are mainly worried about too much oil intake and the accumulation of triglycerides in adipose tissue, which will cause obesity. But we should know that the most fundamental cause of obesity is that energy intake exceeds energy consumption, and the remaining energy will be converted into fat and stored in the body.
We should also know that fat (acid) is an important body component and energy source, and we need to consume a certain amount of fatty acids every day. For example, linoleic acid and α -linolenic acid, most of which needs to be obtained through edible oil, and a lot of vitamin E necessary for human body also needs to be obtained through edible oil. In addition, edible oil also helps us to absorb and utilize some fat-soluble components in food.
Therefore, don’t pursue oil-free cooking excessively. If you eat too little cooking oil for a long time, it will easily lead to insufficient intake of unsaturated fatty acids, which will affect memory and neurological function of the brain, and may also affect the removal of low-density lipoprotein in the blood and induce some cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
So, how to eat fried food is relatively healthy?
First, don’t eat too much. Fried foods are often high in oil and fat, which are high-energy foods. Eating too much can easily lead to excessive energy intake; Secondly, don’t take too long to make fried food. Like vegetarian dishes for a minute or two, meat dishes are slightly different depending on the thickness of the ingredients, and generally only need to be fried until the surface is slightly yellow and not burnt. Under the action of high temperature for a long time, oil is prone to complex chemical changes such as hydrolysis, condensation and polymerization, which may produce a variety of harmful components to human body; Third, some non-frying methods can be used properly. When using air fryer, it is necessary to pay attention to the setting temperature should not be too high (within 120℃ as far as possible) and the production time should not be too long (about 10 minutes), so as to avoid generating too many potential harmful components; Finally, be careful not to use too much seasoning, especially salt.
(Source: Popular Science China)
