Health

Health Breakthroughs

Back away from that burnt toast

■ Sure, everybody knows that eating seriously cinder-ised meats from the grill isn’t the smartest move you can make (unless you’re trying to get cancer, in which case have we got a blackened ribeye recipe for you!).

But a study review just put out by the UK’s Food Standards Agency has found that the same cancerous substances that show up in overgrilled meats can also lurk in overcooked starchy foods, including everything from scorched potato chips and fries to charred toast.

The evildoer is acrylamide, a chemical that’s been connected to cancer in lab studies. It’s produced not only when tobacco is burnt, but also when foods containing water, sugar and amino acids are burnt at higher than 120° .

The higher the temp a food is cooked at, the blacker it gets, increasing acrylamides.

Acrylamides have also been linked to nervous system damage.

HOW ’D YOU LI K E TO FEEL 27% LESS PH YSICA L PA I N A N D 4 4% LESS EMOT IONA L PA I N ? T H I N K A BOU T I T…

Where there’s smoke, there’s cancer. Burn a starchy food like toast and you create a carcinogen. Fight cancer, join the March Charge

■ When Jacob Walker (pictured) had trouble concentrating at work two years ago, his GP wrongly diagnosed him with “anxiety” — the truth was way more sinister. The 30year-old TV producer had a cancerous tumour on his brain that not even a fivehour operation could entirely remove. He is now required to have MRI scans every three months to monitor the disease, but that hasn’t stopped the courageous Melburnian from running the New York Marathon (just eight months after the op) and becoming a triathlete. Now an ambassador for the March Charge (themarchcharge. com.au), a national movement which asks people run, ride or swim down cancer this month, Jacob says embracing fitness has helped him come to terms with his condition: “Having fitness goals and achieving them gives me the strength to set more goals and hopefully overcome cancer.”

Twice-an-hour sex soups up your sperm

■ For better or for worse (depending on your current, uh... life goals), having sex twice an hour can make your baby batter three times more fertile, say researchers at London’s North Middlesex Hospital.

In the study, 73 hoping-to-conceive couples were given intrauterine insemination (IUI), which places sperm directly into the womb.

IUI typically has about a 6% success rate — but when the sperm was from a fresh batch taken within 60 minutes of the first milking, the rate jumped to 20% — just 4% less than in vitro fertilisation.

Mindfulness: better than morphine?

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What if there were a no-cost, nonsurgical, drug-free way to “close the gate” that lets the feeling of pain into your brain? Well, there is, say US researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center — you just have to use your head.

For the study, 75 volunteers were burnt with a thermal probe set at 50° (“A level of heat most people find very painful,” the report notes) while their responses were recorded in an MRI. Subjects were then split into groups: one got four days of real training on mindfulness, like deep breathing/meditation, and three got fake lessons, a placebo cream or nothing.

When the subjects were dragged — er, asked — back to the MRI to be burnt again, the results were mind-blowing: those who used their bogus treatment to try and handle the pain said it was lessened just a bit — likely a placebo effect — while the real mindfulness learners reported 27% less physical and 44% less emotional pain. In comparison, even morphine has been shown to reduce physical pain by only 22%.

The study, says lead author Dr Fadel Zeidan, “shows mindfulness meditation can be used with existing pain therapies” — a potential pain-management boon for everyone.