 The main purpose of frying is to produce foods with good consumer acceptability. However, not all acceptable foods are safe. Food chemists have been keenly interested in the newly discovered toxic compounds produced by frying. We've been refining vegetable oils for more than a century, but only recently have we discovered that this can produce concerning compounds such as 3 MCPD and even worse, glycidol. I talked previously about 3 MCPD, it's considered a non-genotoxic carcinogen with a tolerable daily intake, whereas glycidol is a known genotoxic carcinogen, meaning it can cause cancer by directly damaging our DNA. If a compound is not directly DNA damaging, it's assumed that it acts through a mechanism that exhibits a threshold, a so-called no-effect level, may exist, a level below which the compound may not be harmful. But if a compound does damage DNA, historically a non-threshold mechanism is assumed and no safe level of intake can be derived, because it may only take a single DNA mutation to start the march towards cancer. So such substances are not permitted to be added intentionally to foods. For so-called unavoidable contaminants, the Allara approach is applied, meaning that the level should be as low as reasonably achievable or as low as reasonably practical. Since that's what glycidol appears to be, we should try to avoid it as much as possible. An excess lifetime cancer risk of 1 in 100,000 is often used as a figure for acceptable risk in a population. Based on lab animal data, this might be exceeded if someone weighing about 150 pounds consumed less than a microgram a day. Thanks to the use of refined oils and so many food products, though, the average glycidol exposure may be more than 50 micrograms, and in children the level of intake may exceed acceptable cancer risk by 200 fold. So, do people who eat more fried food get more cancer? There's said to be strong evidence that there may be a high risk of developing chronic disease among frequent consumers of fried foods, but that's talking largely about cardiovascular health. For example, in a study of more than 100,000 women, frequent consumption of fried foods, especially fried chicken and fried fish, were associated with a high risk of all-cause mortality, meaning such consumers lived, on average, significantly shorter lives. But that was largely due to cardiovascular mortality, whereas fried food consumption was not generally associated with dying from cancer. In men, however, a larger intake of fried food was associated with a 35% increased risk of prostate cancer. Therefore, a suggestion may be put forward that subjects at increased risk of prostate cancer should, as a precaution, limit their consumption of fried foods. These refined oils are also used in infant formulas, which presents a problem for babies who aren't breastfed. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment has come to the conclusion that infants who are fed exclusively industrial-prepared infant milk formula would take in harmful levels of glycidol, and they have comparable levels of glycidol contamination in U.S. formulas they do over in Europe. Yet another reason that breast is absolutely best. Meanwhile, there are calls on the manufacturers that these products do everything they can to reduce levels as far as possible. But evidently, the industry has yet to find a way to refine vegetables without creating these kind of byproducts while at the same time maintaining the quality. It is therefore concluded that there are no easy solutions to this problem. But I disagree. We can choose to avoid the use of oils and fried foods.