Appetizing Aromas or Air Pollutants?

Are you eating food or taking in air pollution? Well every time you go to a pizza parlor or a hamburger joint be assured that you are aspiring a large number of polluted particles as you take in the aromas that whet your taste buds!!

Research in the US shows that fatty food (hamburgers) and patties cooked in open charcoal broilers let out eight times the pollutants than those cooked in an oven. But these pollutants are created in the ordinary home as well, as high concentrations of these particles are common in steaks, burgers or grilled veggies.

Scientists in Minnesota have reported that commercial cooking is a surprisingly large source of air pollutants that could pose risks to human health and environment.

According to Deborah Gross, of Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. “While that mouth-watering smell may whet our appetite, it comes from the emission of smoke from the cooking process, into the air that we breathe,”

Gross and Wang set out to get the chemical signature of the mouth-watering aroma from the cooking process and using a combination of chemical and physical measurements of the solid and liquid droplets of aerosol particles emitted, with typical commercial cooking appliances in a kitchen lab at the U-M during cooking steaks in a broiler, pizzas in an oven, hamburgers on a griddle, clamshell broiler and charcoal fire.

The use of certain oils could increase emissions. For 100 pounds of chicken cooked in a wok with peanut oil, 4.5 pounds of emissions were produced. This was presented at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.

Source-Medindia
TRI