Why are we actually not dead long ago, given all that we eat? Our food is full of dangerous ingredients. Some even claim that we regularly poison ourselves while eating, especially with processed foods. That may be an exaggeration. But in fact, food, whether from the garden or the factory, contains a cocktail of organic or mineral components, none of which are ultimately completely harmless: even water is toxic in high doses. The quantity makes the poison.
Of course, there are components that are more dangerous than others, especially those that are very reactive. This includes acrylamide, which forms in roasted, grilled or fried dishes – at temperatures that are completely normal in the kitchen. A chemist would think twice about working at temperatures like this in a laboratory.
The same is true for acrolein: Among other things, it is produced when fats are heated above their smoking point and decompose. The substance is classified as “very easily flammable liquid or gas”, “fatal if inhaled” and “fatal if consumed”. And rightly so, because acrolein reacts with proteins and DNA.
series »Culinary Laboratory«
A glass of wine tastes best with a piece of cheese. But why actually? Why does tea have a detoxifying effect? And how do cookies get really crumbly? The chemist Hervé This, an expert in molecular gastronomy, chats from the potty.
In 2020, however, Chinese nutritionists reported good news: they had observed that smokers who drank tea, coffee or chocolate had very low acrolein levels in the urine. This piqued their interest, and they were finally able to prove that the theophylline in the drinks decreased the amount of acrolein in the body.
The responsiveness of acrolein makes studies of this kind extremely difficult. The Chinese research team not only wanted to prove that the acrolein disappeared, but also to find out what became of it. In doing so, they resorted to modern analysis methods: high-resolution mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and liquid chromatography. The group tested the reactive substances, especially acrolein and theophylline, under controlled environmental conditions with which they mimicked living tissue, among other things. These so-called incubations lasted for several hours.