WHY YOU NEED TO EAT MORE STEWS

THE way you cook your chicken matters! Some compounds in food are considered ‘gerontotoxins’, meaning ageing agents (from the Greek geras for ‘old age’, as in geriatric), and the very apt acronym for the most significant of them all is AGEs.

That stands for Advanced Glycation End products or glycotoxins — and they mostly appear in our bodies via the cooked meat we consume.

AGEs accumulate in our bones, joints, and muscles.

They may contribute to osteoporosis, arthritis, and the weakening, shrinking and loss of muscle mass with age.

They’re also implicated in age-related memory decline, skin ageing, cataracts, Alzheimer’s disease, and erectile dysfunction.

As one pathologist put it: ‘It’s hard to find an age-related disease that AGEs are not involved in.’

They are not just a marker of age, but a driver of ageing. You can significantly cut down on your intake of AGEs by eating stews rather than grills. Different methods of cooking meat produce very different quantities of AGEs, with high dry-heating methods creating the most. ‘Oven-frying’ meat — the way you’d cook breaded or crumbed chicken or fish in the oven, for example — is actually worse than deep-frying, which is worse than grilling, which is worse than roasting. The safest ways of cooking meat are lower-temperature, moist methods, such as boiling, poaching, stewing and steaming.

Boiled beef, for example, has three times fewer AGEs than grilled beef, and boiled eggs have nearly six times fewer than fried eggs.

For the same reason, you should buy your nuts raw rather than roasted.