Article content Cavemen in the Stone Age didn’t have many luxuries. They had, however, learned to make fire by banging together flintstones or rubbing two sticks together, and that at least made their cold and dingy dwellings more comfortable. And fire did something else.
Once the caveman had clubbed his prey, which of course wasn’t a dinosaur, fire allowed the meat to be cooked. If the meat wasn’t eaten right away it would be hung to dry because experience had shown that dried meat keeps longer, especially if exposed to smoke. Much later, science would demonstrate that bacteria require moisture to proliferate, hence the preservative action of drying, and that smoke contributes to the effect due to the antibacterial compounds it contains.
There was another benefit. The meat tasted better! And we have been enjoying smoked meat ever since. At least until studies revealed that where there is smoke, there may be more than one kind of fire.
That fire is in the form of some nasty compounds in smoke, with the term “carcinogen” rearing its ugly head. Smoke contains literally hundreds of compounds, a number of which, particularly polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heterocyclic amines (HCAs) are of concern. In cell culture and animal studies, these have been shown to cause changes in DNA that can lead to cancer.
Cells and animals aren’t people, but some epidemiological studies have also linked the consumption of smoked meats to intestinal cancer. For example, in on.