Bacon sandwiches and fried chicken can raise your risk of dementia

Could a key culprit behind many of our life-threatening modern epidemics — such as children’s food allergies, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer — be a class of toxic substances found in everyday processed foods?

These substances are called advanced glycation end products (or AGEs). They occur to some degree in all foods, but are found at dizzyingly high levels in high-protein, high-sugar processed foods, such as pizzas, burgers, bacon and sausages.

They increase when these foods are cooked at very high temperatures — i.e. baked or fried, rather than steamed or boiled.

The high heat causes their proteins and sugars to react together, making the products look temptingly browned, but also creating extremely high levels of AGEs.

The compounds occur naturally in other foods, but exist at much higher levels in processed foods — so, for example, an average serving of thin-crust pizza will contain hundreds of times more AGEs than a poached egg.

Over the past decade, scientists have established that AGEs can provoke the body to react defensively, creating dangerous chronic inflammation, particularly in our vital organs.

This inflammation is increasingly thought to increase the risk of heart disease and cancer and, more controversially, could be a significant factor in Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, new evidence revealed this month at the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition conference in Glasgow, has identified the effect AGEs can have specifically on children.

As the Mail reported, the study found that children with food allergies had far higher levels of AGEs in their bodies. They also ate far more junk food.

The paediatricians at Naples University in Italy studied more than 60 children in three groups: those with food allergies, those with respiratory allergies such as asthma, and those with no allergies.

Roberto Berni Canani, a professor of paediatric gastroenterology, who led the study, says it may be no coincidence that children’s food allergies have suddenly risen to around 10 per cent across Europe over the past two decades — and that, over a similar period, processed foods have increased ‘dramatically’ to constitute 50 per cent of European family diets.

‘As of yet, no existing theory adequately explains the dramatic increase that has been observed in children’s food allergies,’ he says. ‘Dietary AGEs in highly processed foods may be the missing link. Our study certainly supports this hypothesis.’

But how might AGEs cause children to develop food allergies?

Peter Smith, a professor of medicine at Griffith University in Australia has suggested a mechanism he calls the ‘false alarm hypothesis’. AGEs closely resemble specialised ‘warning’ molecules in our bodies called alarmins, which exist to trigger our immune defence systems against dying bodily cells that might otherwise fester and poison us.

So when, for example, we have a bruise or a cut, the body releases alarmin molecules that tell the immune system to expel the damaged cells from the body.

When children eat highly processed foods, the cascade of AGEs they ingest sets off a ‘false alarm’ in their guts, Professor Smith suggested in the Journal Of Allergy And Clinical Immunology in 2017. 

This, in turn, triggers their still-developing immune systems to become oversensitive to harmless proteins in common foods such as wheat, eggs and milk.

But it is not only children who may suffer serious harm from AGEs. While adults seem far less susceptible to false alarm syndrome (possibly as their mature immune systems ignore AGE molecules), ageing metabolisms appear to become increasingly susceptible to the chronic inflammation that AGEs spark.

In 2015, a U.S. study in the Journal Of Clinical Biochemistry And Nutrition warned that high-calorie processed diets can overwhelm the body’s regulatory systems with toxic AGEs, precipitating a cascade of cell damage that may ultimately cause the insulin resistance characteristic of type 2 diabetes.

High AGE consumption may also raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes in people who don’t have diabetes. And it is being linked with a raised risk of cancer — another disease associated with chronic inflammation.

Researchers have repeatedly found through blood tests that

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