Health Watch: The menace of toast -- and of French fries fried darker than "golden"

So you love toast, do you? But does toast love you? This toast is not only not golden, it is surely by any standard dark brown. Why not just swallow poison?

"Acrylamide [is] a chemical that causes cancer in animals. . . . The FDA suggests these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide: . . .

"* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown."

-- from a "Johns Hopkins Health Alert,"
"The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking"

by Ken

What? You mean you're toasting your toast dark brown? I'll bet you're also the kind of person who fries your French fries darker than "a golden yellow color." Good grief, Sir or Madam, why don't you just swallow a healthy, or rather terminally unhealthy, dose of cyanide? Robert Benchley once wrote a piece called "The Menace of Buttered Toast"; now it turns out that the menace may be the toast itself!

So naturally I think of shmura matzo.

I've mentioned a couple of times the fascinating pre-Passover tour I took with the Wolfe Walkers in which Justin Ferate led us into the heart of Chassidic Brooklyn. From Justin's tour description it was clear that in negotiating our tour with our Lubavitcher hosts he had been trying urgently to secure a promise of one of the possible tour features: a visit to the Lubavitchers' shmura matzo factory.

You don't see Justin getting much bubblier -- and Justin is someone whose many great enthusiasms render him more than usually prone to bubbling -- than when he was able to inform us that the matzo-factory visit was confirmed.

Some other time we might wish to talk about matzo manufacture among avowedly observant Jews, in fulfillment of the requirement that, to qualify as unleavened bread as required for Passover consumption (in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, when the fleeing Jews were instructed, in the interest of all possible haste, to prepare bread without allowing the dough time to rise), the product has to be made completely, beginning at the moment the water hits the flour, in 18 minutes.

For now, though, let's just say that shmura matzo is made the old-fashioned way: entirely by hand, with lots of preparers on hand in the cramped space to roll out just-produced little chunks of dough into flat discs for immediate transfer to an excruciatingly hot oven. (I'm recalling something like 15 seconds at 1200 degrees. Rabbi Beryl Epstein, our tour guide from the Chassidic Discovery Center, explained that if the dough is left in the oven even a second too long, it will burst into flame. This must simply the quality-control operation.) When the person manning the oven paddle pulls a batch of completed matzos out and dumps them aside, they don't look exactly yummy.

And it's not cheap. We had the opportunity to buy the shmura product at the source, and considering that I had lived my life as long as I had without ever consuming this truly authentic product, and didn't expect to have a comparable opportunity to do so anytime soon, I fought back my native cheapness and paid the freight: $21.75 for a pound box.

Justin explained to us that basically the stuff tastes burnt, and that consequently his partner loves it because he loves foods with a charred flavor. I discovered with my first bite that Justin's description, as usual, was on the money. The stuff tastes burnt. Nevertheless, it didn't take me all that long to consume my pound's worth.

Now, however, I have to rethink the whole shmura-matzo issue, If this "Johns Hopkins Health Alert" is to be trusted -- and are we going to start mistrusting one of our leading medical centers, or anyway the commercial partner to which it lends its name? It looks like God is butting heads with the FDA.

Johns Hopkins Health Alert

The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking

You know that many fried foods pose a health risk because of their saturated fat content. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that food fried -- and baked -- at high temperatures is cause for concern.

High-temperature frying, baking and toasting causes certain sugars and an amino acid in mainly plant-based foods like bread, potatoes, cereal, crackers, coffee and dried fruit to form acrylamide, a chemical that causes cancer in animals. Scientists suspect that acrylamide causes cancer in humans, too.

Although you can't eliminate acrylamide from your diet -- it's estimated to be in up to 40 percent of the calories Americans consume -- the FDA suggests taking these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide:

* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown.

* Don't eat areas of food that are burned or dark from cooking.

* Don't overcook food like frozen French fries -- they should be a golden yellow color.

* Store potatoes in a dark, cool place, never in the refrigerator, which increases acrylamide during cooking.

The FDA has also issued a draft document advising food service operators, manufacturers and growers of strategies to reduce acrylamide amounts in foods.

Published in FDA Consumer Health Information.

Posted in Nutrition and Weight Control on April 30, 2014

Medical Disclaimer: This information is not intended to substitute for the advice of a physician. Click here for additional information: Johns Hopkins Health Alerts Disclaimer

What can I tell you? I am a person who has frequently been known to toast my toast to full brownness -- maybe not "dark brown," but incontestably darker than "golden." I have close friends who routinely specify that theiir French fries be fully cooked, by which they don't mean "golden."

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