Comment by BJones12
4 days ago
For the uninitiated in Advanced Glycation Ends (AGEs):
> AGEs can also be ingested from food, especially food cooked at high temperatures and with little moisture, like grilled meats, fried foods, and baked goods.[23] The Maillard reaction is the main nonenzymatic reaction known to form AGEs in cooking and is famously known for the distinct browning color and complex flavor and aroma of roasted coffee, French fries, seared meat, and other favorites.
In short, if it tastes nice and was man-processed, it probably will be bad for you?
That's a good first-order approximation, but is missing some nuance.
An example they use is eggs: Pan-fried eggs are listed as high in AGEs, whereas scrambled eggs aren't. Admittedly my diet isn't the best, but I wouldn't have expected a meaningful difference between ordering my eggs scrambled vs sunnyside-up.
Or for meat, stewed meat would be healthier than roasted meat.
I'm suddenly curious about coffee, now that they mention it...
Scrambled eggs don't have any browning, sunny side up does.
1 reply →
Coffee is very low in AGEs as per Table 2 of https://www.jandonline.org/article/S0002-8223(10)00238-5/ful...
The browning is what makes food taste great for me, and that is what makes sunny side up eggs be less healthy. If you browned an omlette, it’d have a similar effect, I imagine.
I mean, the nuance seemed captured by the "in short" here, as you are just providing examples of things that taste nicer ;P.
Well, it was good for us when we first tamed fire, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Ain't greater modern cargo cult than "healthy food".
People didn’t live very long when we first tamed fire - not because of diet, but because something else in nature would eventually get you first. So it didn’t really matter what early humans ate as long as it gave them immediate energy.
People only needed to live long enough to reproduce, and that’s what our bodies are optimized for. Most people would prefer to live longer, though. ;)