From poisoned party to toxic toast: How to get nerve poison out of your food

Great food should be something to “die for,” not something to die of.

There are two sources of poison in your food. One is from the food itself. The other is from the way it is prepared. Even organic foods can be toxic if improperly prepared. And overcooking food can literally make you sick.

Many foods can be eaten raw, others need to be cooked. You can’t have bread, cake, fries and fried potatoes without cooking. So what’s wrong with overcooking?

It’s easy to forget that cooking is a chemical process. A recipe book is actually a chemical procedure manual. Cooking can break down food to make it easier to digest, and it can also create new chemical compounds that weren’t in the original food product, depending on the food ingredients, cooking temperature, and cooking time.

Cooking and steaming food at 212 degrees F does not appear to produce any harmful chemicals. But bake, roast, roast, and otherwise heat certain foods above 248 degrees F, and toxins begin to build up in carbohydrate products. Normal baking temperatures are much higher. And processed foods are often heated to higher temperatures during processing.

All grain products, including healthy whole grain products, begin to form acrylamide when cooked at normal baking, roasting and roasting temperatures. This is very bad since acrylamide is a powerful neurotoxin or neurotoxin. What nutritionists tout as a “healthy grain” is toxic when baked or roasted.

According to the National Institutes of Health in their publication Acrylamide Neurotoxicity:

While many researchers believe that human exposure to relatively low dietary levels of acrylamide does not result in clinical neuropathy, some neurotoxicologists are concerned about the potential of its cumulative neurotoxicity. It has been shown in several studies that the same neurotoxic effects can be observed at low and high doses of acrylamide, with the low doses merely requiring longer exposure.

The Database of Hazardous Material says about acrylamide:

health hazard

Classified as Very Toxic… It is a cumulative neurotoxin and repeated exposure to small amounts can seriously damage the nervous system. The neurological effects may be delayed. Symptoms of acrylamide toxicity are consistent with midbrain lesions and blocked transport along both motor and sensory axons. Persons with disorders of the nervous system should not be exposed to acrylamide. (EPA, 1998)

This means that bread, cereal, cakes, cookies, crackers, french fries and all those crunchy, toasted things that most people love to eat contain acrylamide. And it’s also formed by the roasting of grains like coffee and grain-based coffee substitutes. Oddly enough, California-style black olives have very high acrylamide levels due to their processing both from the can and especially after cooking, like on a pizza.

Here is a list of acrylamide in various foods compiled by the FDA.

How much neurotoxin is it safe to have in your food? It depends on the dose of poison and your body’s ability to detoxify from it.

If you’re overall healthy, you can probably withstand low levels of foodborne acrylamide for many years before it might catch up with you in old age. Many elderly people experience numb and tingling feet and hands, a well-known consequence of acrylamide poisoning. Could lifelong acrylamide be a cause or could it make the cause worse?

What if you already have a nerve problem? You may have Long-COVID, a growing health crisis related to neurological problems stemming from COVID-19 infection. According to the CDC, the neurological symptoms of long-COVID neuropathy include palpitations, difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”), headaches, trouble sleeping, lightheadedness, paresthesia (or tingling), changes in smell or taste, and depression or anxiety. It is now speculated that this neuropathy could also lead to dementia.

If you have these problems then you may be much more sensitive to low doses of acrylamide in your diet. It is well known that people with nerve problems should avoid neurotoxins. Really everyone should.

Here are some tips to reduce acrylamide in your food:

1. Eat food as raw as possible. When cooking, only boil or steam.
2. Avoid beverages made from roasted grains, including coffee and coffee substitutes. Try tea instead.
3. Eat a balanced diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, and healthy grains that are only boiled or steamed.
4. If you decide to eat toast or a baked product, remember that the darker the crust, the higher the acrylamide content. It is better to remove the crust from the bread and eat the soft inside.
5. Avoid black olives. Green olives are fine.
6. Tobacco also contains acrylamide, so this is another reason to avoid smoking and secondhand smoke.
7. Acrylamide is also in cosmetics and creams and in anything that contains polyacrylamide, which breaks down to acrylamide. So even as you reduce your food exposure, you still need to look at the sources of acrylamide in other products in your life. It’s in more products than you think.

For a more detailed discussion, see Cooked to Death: How the Acrylamide in Food Causes Nerve Damage and Long COVID.

About the author: Sydney Ross Singer is a medical anthropologist, author and director of the Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease. He is a pioneer of applied medical anthropology, focusing on the cultural causes of disease.

(To sign up for a free subscription to Food Safety News,click here)