Instincto and culinary chemistry

The housewife who concocts his small dishes is generally not conscious of the chemical reactions taking place in his pan or saucepan. Neither in its microwave oven.

It is clear that the foods that are cooked changing taste and consistency. This even testifies to a profound change in molecular structures of food substrates. Nutritionists talk about “predigestion”, assuming that “broken” molecules are easier to digest, knowing that the mission of our digestive enzymes is precisely to cut them into small sections that our cells can then use to build the molecules peculiar to the human body.

Cooked foods are indeed easier to digest. But this predigestion actually hides all kinds of parasitic chemical reactions whose consequences should not be neglected. The aromatic chemist Maillard signaled the whole thing in 1917: he was looking for the molecule supposed to give the taste of cooked potato to the cooked potato, and had to note that incalculable number of molecules of all kinds were generated under the effect. heat.

The temperature is indeed nothing but the effect of the speed of the molecules. When heating a food, the molecules for most very complex which constitute it increases in speed, more violently clash so that they break, combine or deform in random ways. In other words, cooking generates a molecular disorder that does not exist in natural foods.

The new chemical species produced, are in principle not provided for by our enzymes. The enzymatic structures of our digestive and metabolic device are indeed adapted to the molecules found in the natural environment where the evolution took place. There was only very rarely from heat-processed foods, so that the enzymes made by our cells should be feared not capable of properly treating some of these new molecules. In other words, culinary chemical reactions can be expected to produce non-degradable molecules, which may have all kinds of harmful effects on the functioning of the body.

A toxin secreted by a pathogenic bacterium, or by the salivary glands of a reptile, for example, is nothing but a molecule escaping the degradation work provided by the enzymes available to the organization of the victim and capable of flooding some biological mechanisms. The reasoning model is exactly the same for the molecules produced during culinary chemical reactions that would escape the digestive and metabolic functions whose evolution has endowed us, and some of which may disrupt our vital mechanisms.

It is therefore not aberrant, although medicine prefers to obscure the phenomenon, to speak of “toxins” about the non-degradable molecules from culinary chemical reactions, to the extent that any disorders. We can then talk about intoxication, to differentiate the process of intoxication, this more conventional term being reserved for known toxic substances, such as different poisons, pesticides, some products of the chemical industry etc.

The question is to what extent the foreign molecules from culinary chemical reactions are harmful or harmless. Two ways are possible to determine it: