When was the last time you thought about how your blood flows through your body? Not something on most people’s radar. However, our blood could also be likened to the river of life inside us. Blood flows throughout our body bringing nutrients and oxygen to every single cell and collecting the cell wastes and carbon dioxide.
The pipes that our blood flows in are our blood vessels – tubes of varying sizes which include arteries, veins, and capillaries. Your body contains about 60,000 miles or over 96,000 km of blood vessels.
So why am I talking about blood and blood vessels?
As with most aspects of our health, we pay little attention until something goes wrong. When it comes to our blood, this is no different.
While there are, as always, many factors that influence blood viscosity (thickness of flow), here is one that is perhaps given far less attention than others – how we prepare our food.
Cooking can make food toxic
A small study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition investigated what happened when the same meal was given to type 2 diabetics under two different cooking preparations.
In one scenario, the foods were prepared by frying or broiling at 230°C for 20 min, and in the other, these same foods were steamed or boiled at 100°C for 10 min. The participants ate both meals at different times, and the researchers measured the ability of their blood vessels to respond to increased blood flow, a way to measure vascular function.
What the researchers found was that the fried/broiled meal caused endothelial dysfunction compared with the steamed/boiled meal. This is significant as the inability of the blood vessel to properly widen in response to blood flow is one of the first steps towards the development of atherosclerosis. And, it was just after ONE meal!
The takeaway from this study and similar studies is to use slow, low, moist methods of cooking (like steaming) rather than dry, high-heat temperatures.
What you cook in is also important. Deanna Minich has compiled a detailed blog on the different types of cookware and their properties, but there’s truly no one type of cookware that is “the ultimate”.
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