Beauty Health for Life

Frequent, regular consumption has strongest effect and is linked to more aggressive disease

Regular consumption of deep-fried foods such as French fries, fried chicken and doughnuts is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, and the effect appears to be slightly stronger with regard to more aggressive forms of the disease, according to a study by investigators at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Corresponding author Janet L. Stanford, Ph.D., and colleagues Marni Stott-Miller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow and Marian Neuhouser, Ph.D., all of the Hutchinson Center’s Public Health Sciences Division, have published their findings online in The Prostate.

While previous studies have suggested that eating foods made with high-heat cooking methods, such as grilled meats, may increase the risk of prostate cancer, this is the first study to examine the addition of deep frying to the equation.

From French fries to doughnuts: Eating more than once a week may raise risk

Specifically, Stanford, co-director of the Hutchinson Center’s Program in Prostate Cancer Research, and colleagues found that men who reported eating French fries, fried chicken, fried fish and/or doughnuts at least once a week were at an increased risk of prostate cancer as compared to men who said they ate such foods less than once a month.

In particular, men who ate one or more of these foods at least weekly had an increased risk of prostate cancer that ranged from 30 to 37 percent. Weekly consumption of these foods was associated also with a slightly greater risk of more aggressive prostate cancer. The researchers controlled for factors such as age, race, family history of prostate cancer, body-mass index and PSA screening history when calculating the association between eating deep-fried foods and prostate cancer risk.

“The link between prostate cancer and select deep-fried foods appeared to be limited to the highest level of consumption – defined in our study as more than once a week – which suggests that regular consumption of deep-fried foods confers particular risk for developing prostate cancer,” Stanford said.

Deep frying may trigger formation of carcinogens in food

Possible mechanisms behind the increased cancer risk, Stanford hypothesizes, include the fact that when oil is heated to temperatures suitable for deep frying, potentially carcinogenic compounds can form in the fried food. They include acrylamide (found in carbohydrate-rich foods such as French fries), heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (chemicals formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures), aldehyde (an organic compound found in perfume) and acrolein (a chemical found in herbicides). These toxic compounds are increased with re-use of oil and increased length of frying time.

Foods cooked with high heat also contain high levels of advanced glycation endproducts, or AGEs, which have been associated with chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. Deep-fried foods are among the highest in AGE content. A chicken breast deep fried for 20 minutes contains more than nine times the amount of AGEs as a chicken breast boiled for an hour, for example.

For the study, Stanford and colleagues analyzed data from two prior population-based case-control studies involving a total of 1,549 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and 1,492 age-matched healthy controls. The men were Caucasian and African-American Seattle-area residents and ranged in age from 35 to 74 years. Participants were asked to fill out a dietary questionnaire about their usual food intake, including specific deep-fried foods.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to look at the association between intake of deep-fried food and risk of prostate cancer,” Stanford said. However, deep-fried foods have previously been linked to cancers of the breast, lung, pancreas, head and neck, and esophagus.

Because deep-fried foods are primarily eaten outside the home, it is possible that the link between these foods and prostate cancer risk may be a sign of high consumption of fast foods in general, the authors wrote, citing the dramatic increase in fast-food restaurants and fast-food consumption in the U.S. in the past several decades.

Male pattern baldness is linked to an increased risk of coronary heart disease, but only if its on the top/crown of the head, rather than at the front, finds an analysis of published evidence in the online journal BMJ Open.

A receding hairline is not linked to an increased risk, the analysis indicates.

The researchers trawled the Medline and the Cochrane Library databases for research published on male pattern baldness and coronary heart disease, and came up with 850 possible studies, published between 1950 and 2012.

But only six satisfied all the eligibility criteria and so were included in the analysis. All had been published between 1993 and 2008, and involved just under 40,000 men.

Three of the studies were cohort studies - meaning that the health of balding men was tracked for at least 11 years.

Analysis of the findings from these showed that men who had lost most of their hair were a third more likely (32%) to develop coronary artery disease than their peers who retained a full head of hair.

When the analysis was confined to men under the age of 55-60, a similar pattern emerged. Bald or extensively balding men were 44% more likely to develop coronary artery disease.

Analysis of the other three studies, which compared the heart health of those who were bald / balding with those who were not, painted a similar picture.

It showed that balding men were 70% more likely to have heart disease, and those in younger age groups were 84% more likely to do so.

Three studies assessed the degree of baldness using a validated scale (Hamilton scale). Analysis of these results indicated that the risk of coronary artery disease depended on baldness severity, but only if this was on the top/crown of the head, known as the vertex.

Extensive vertex baldness boosted the risk by 48%, moderate vertex baldness by 36%, and mild vertex baldness by 18%. By contrast, a receding hairline made very little difference to risk, the analysis showed.

To compensate for differences in the methods of assessing baldness in the studies included in the analysis, the authors looked at four differing grades of baldness: none; frontal; crown-top; combined.

Once again, this indicated that the severity of baldness affected the risk of coronary heart disease.

Men with both frontal and crown-top baldness were 69% more likely to have coronary artery disease than those with a full head of hair, while those with just crown-top baldness were 52% more likely to do so. Those with just frontal baldness were 22% more likely to do so.

Explanations for the reasons behind the association vary, but include the possibility that baldness may indicate insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes; a state of chronic inflammation; or increased sensitivity to testosterone, all of which are involved directly or indirectly in promoting cardiovascular disease, say the authors.

But they conclude: "[Our] findings suggest that vertex baldness is more closely associated with systemic atherosclerosis than with frontal baldness. Thus, cardiovascular risk factors should be reviewed caully in men with vertex baldness, especially younger men" who should "probably be encouraged to improve their cardiovascular risk profile."