Foods fried in vegetable oil are popular worldwide, but research about the health effects of this cooking technique has been largely inconclusive and focused on healthy people.
Foods fried in vegetable oil are popular worldwide, but research about the health effects of this cooking technique has been largely inconclusive and focused on healthy people. For the first time, UMass Amherst food scientists set out to examine the impact of frying oil consumption on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colon cancer, using animal models.
In their paper published Aug. 23 in Cancer Prevention Research, lead author and Ph.D. student Jianan Zhang, associate professor Guodong Zhang, and professor and department head Eric Decker showed that feeding frying oil to mice exaggerated colonic inflammation, enhanced tumor growth and worsened gut leakage, spreading bacteria or toxic bacterial products into the bloodstream.
“People with colonic inflammation or colon cancer should be aware of this research,” says Jianan Zhang.
Guodong Zhang, whose food science lab focuses on the discovery of new cellular targets in the treatment of colon cancer and how to reduce the risks of IBD, stresses that “it’s not our message that frying oil can cause cancer.”
Read more at University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Image: For their research, food scientists used samples of canola oil in which falafel had been deep-fried. (Credit: UMass Amherst)
