When you fire up the grill for your Memorial Day cookout, beware: Those tantalizing aromas hold an underestimated health risk. So the reporter is a budding liberal I see. Grilling meats at a high temperature can produce cancer-causing compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. You can be exposed to significant PAH levels simply by breathing in the sweet scent of barbecue. No mention of contributing to gerbil worming? They must have given up.
A new study from China suggests letting your skin come into contact with PAHs when you grill food is even more harmful than just savoring the aroma. And clothing won't fully protect you against them.
PAHs can cause lung disease and DNA mutations, the researchers said. Though eating barbecued meats is the most common source of exposure, just standing near a grill and breathing PAH-contaminated air can be risky, previous studies have shown. Ask me if I care, PETA-member cow-fart denier. For the latest study, published May 23 in Environmental Science & Technology, a team led by Eddy Y. Zeng at Jinan University closely examined skin exposure to PAHs from barbecue fumes and particles.
The researchers divided volunteers into groups based on various levels of exposure to grilled foods and smoke.
Urine samples revealed the greatest PAH exposure came from eating grilled foods, but skin contact was in second place, followed by inhalation of barbecue fumes. Are you going to eat the rest of that steak? Clothes can help protect you from the smoke, but only for a short period, the researchers noted in a journal news release. Once fabrics become saturated with contaminated smoke, the skin can absorb high PAH levels. I like to hang my clean clothes on the clothesline and position the BBQ so they're downwind.
To reduce your exposure to these toxic compounds, the researchers recommend laundering clothes immediately after you are around a grill. That kinda defeats the purpose. "Here, have a shot of Liquid Smoke"
#4
Given that we've been eating BBQ ever since the invention of fire we should all be dead by now.
I estimate that the vast majority of humans who have ever eaten BBQ ARE dead by now, all 70 or so billion of them.
#6
Not only will I stand downwind of the BBQ, but I will insist that the beef I buy come only from cattle that have been fenced in with fence posts made from old-growth trees, and fed only a high GMO-based grain diet. None of that phoney baloney free-range organic crap for me!
#7
You know what else generates lots of cancer-causing PAH's? Smoking pot. Odd that this never seems to get mentioned by the MFM. (Pot smokers all, would be my bet.)
#9
They are more than welcome to eat all the solylent green, blue, red or purple. I'll continue eating my dead char brioled cow, chicken, pig and shrimp. We'll see who dies Happy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
When you fire up the grill for your Memorial Day cookout, beware: Those tantalizing aromas hold an underestimated health risk.
Grilling meats at a high temperature can produce cancer-causing compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. You can be exposed to significant PAH levels simply by breathing in the sweet scent of barbecue.
For the latest study, published May 23 in Environmental Science & Technology, a team led by Eddy Y. Zeng at Jinan University closely examined skin exposure to PAHs from barbecue fumes and particles.
Clothes can help protect you from the smoke, but only for a short period, the researchers noted in a journal news release. Once fabrics become saturated with contaminated smoke, the skin can absorb high PAH levels.
