The Latest Trick To Reduce Your Risk Of Cancer
How can soaking steak in beer cut your risk of cancer?
You don’t often see advice suggesting that a person should eat more beef. It clogs the arteries, increases blood pressure and is a contributing factor to stomach cancer. On a larger scale, eating beef also vastly increases your carbon footprint and propagates the cattle industry, one of the smellier factors helping to melt our glaciers daily. But because red meat, to some extent, does a body good and because a safe source of cloned cattle isn’t viable yet, let’s eat ’em while we got ’em. While we do it, let’s soak our steaks in beer. It’ll cut the risk of cancer!
Booze Marinade
Published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry are the details of the latest study conducted by researchers at the University of Porto in Portugal about using beer and wine to marinate steak. That wasn’t their central purpose, of course. The process of frying or broiling muscle meats like beef, fish, pork, chicken and other beaked critters at high heat greatly increases levels of certain carcinogens called heterocyclic amines (HAs). The charred crusted black parts of any well-seared steak and the charred black bits that end up in the frying pan contain huge clusters of HAs, since the amines are formed when amino acids and muscle creatine react at high temperatures.
Researchers believe using beer and wine to marinate beef before cooking could reduce the amount of HAs in the cooking process due to the water-retaining sugars found in each beverage. The sugars would prevent water-soluble molecules in steak to surface, where high heat would form more HAs.
Fun With Cooking
To test their theories, researchers used rib eye steaks from middle-age cows, which were chilled for 24 hours before having as much fat and connective tissue removed as possible. The steaks were then cut to weigh 90 to 100 grams each. The first marinade used consisted of a pilsner, made with 5.4 per cent alcohol, water, malt, some un-malted cereals and hops, while the second contained a red wine, made with 13 per cent alcohol and three grape varieties. Steak samples were marinated for 1, 2, 4 and 6 hours at 18°C with 350ml of wine and beer in plastic containers, then lightly dried and pan-fried at 4 minutes per side without oil on a gas cooker between 180°C and 200°C.
Chewy Results
Study researchers found that 6 hours of marinating beef in either beer or red wine cut levels of two types of HAs by 88 per cent. Beer was more effective at reducing levels of a third type of HAs after just 4 hours, while wine took 6 hours to reach the same HAs reduction level. Other culinary ingredients that reduced HA levels included olive oil, lemon juice and garlic. So far scientists have identified at least 17 different types of heterocyclic amines that are formed due to cooking meats at high temperatures and the cooking methods that bring out the highest HAs levels. Frying, barbecuing and broiling increase HAs levels the most. Temperatures between 200°C and 250°C (392°F and 482°F) can increase heterocyclic amine levels by almost three times. Oven roasting and oven baking create lower levels of HAs, but gravies made from meat drippings still contain very high HAs levels, while boiling, stewing and poaching meats creates almost no heterocyclic amines.
Study researchers also included a taste test of sorts, for what is a study about marinating steak if there is no tasting to be done afterward? A painstaking 14 sensory attributes were selected for evaluation, including smell, bitterness, juiciness, smell intensity, meat colour, wine or beer aroma and overall look. The taste tests were conducted on steaks that had been marinating for 2 hours, because they found steaks marinating for 4 and 6 hours to have a poor overall quality, including a stronger wine-smell and deeper red colouring. The beer, however, was found not to affect the colour of the steak and tasters preferred the texture, the taste and the look of beer-marinated steak.
Healthy Diversion
Soaking steak in beer sounds like a good idea and a considerable distraction as well, to get your mind away from the fact that this type of marinade only reduces the cancer risk in beef by a very miniscule amount.
Sources:
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
BBC News
NewScientist.com
