Original title: Can frying with garlic pan cause cancer? Experts help you answer questions

Many people choose garlic pan when frying vegetables, but some people have heard that cooking with garlic pan often may cause cancer. Is there any basis for this statement?

Ruan Guangfeng, director of the Science and Technology Communication Department and associate research librarian of Kexin Food and Health Information Exchange Center, said in an interview with China Consumer Daily that garlic is just a common condiment in the kitchen. The reason why some people on the Internet say that garlic cooking can cause cancer is that garlic cooking can produce Grade 2A carcinogens such as acrylamide, which leads people to believe that eating garlic cooking food regularly will increase the risk of cancer. At present, animal experiments have not confirmed the association between acrylamide intake, levels of related biochemical markers and human cancer risk. That is to say, 2A carcinogens do not absolutely cause cancer, but have the possibility of causing cancer. Therefore, it cannot be said that as long as garlic is used in cooking, it will definitely increase the risk of cancer.

The Hong Kong Food Safety Center once sent 22 kinds of vegetable samples, such as garlic and onion, to the laboratory to study the amount of acrylamide generated during the frying process. It was found that acrylamide would be produced by frying garlic, but only 0.2 μ g acrylamide could be produced per gram of garlic on average. This means that if you want to make garlic stir frying pan to achieve the effect of carcinogenesis, you need to ingest thousands of tons of garlic stir frying pan to possibly induce cancer. In the pan, a few cloves of garlic are enough to produce acrylamide.

The substances like "acrylamide" produced in the cooking process are actually by-products of the "Maillard reaction" (that is, non enzymatic browning reaction, which is a sign of food taste). As long as the food contains carbohydrate (starch, sugar), fat and protein at the same time, "Maillard reaction" may occur in cooking operations such as frying, roasting, braising, frying, etc. So in fact, acrylamide is not only produced in garlic frying pan, but also contained in coffee, potato chips, brown sugar and other foods.

Of course, acrylamide is not good for human body. In order to reduce acrylamide intake, the oil should not be too hot when garlic is used in frying pan, and garlic grains should be slightly yellow.