From verywellhealth.com
Key Takeaways
- Cooking with low temperatures and high moisture, like boiling or stewing, may help reduce inflammation and lower psoriasis flares.
- Dry heat cooking methods, such as grilling or frying, can increase advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which worsen inflammation and oxidative stress.
- Marinating meat in acidic liquids, like lemon or tomato juice, can help reduce the formation of AGEs.
If you live with psoriasis, you likely have the list of trigger foods that can worsen your symptoms practically memorized — alcohol, refined sugar, ultra-processed foods, and so on. But what if how you prepare your food was just as important as what you eat?
Research shows that cooking with dry and high temperatures can increase the formation of compounds called advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which boost inflammation in your body.
While evidence is still emerging, experts say it’s worth considering switching your food preparation process if you live with psoriasis. Using low temperatures and high moisture when cooking may protect your gut, decrease skin inflammation, and lower the risk of psoriasis flares.
Why Do Some Cooking Methods Increase Inflammation?
The body naturally makes AGEs in small amounts, which are known as endogenous AGEs. But you also get exogenous, or “dietary,” AGEs from food. These dietary AGEs can add to the total amount of AGEs, contributing to inflammation and other harmful health effects.
“AGEs are produced when a sugar molecule combines with a protein or fat molecule in the body,” said Rajani Katta, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology at UTHealth Houston and author. This process is known as the Maillard reaction, which gives your food its golden-brown colour and flavourful aroma.
However, the Maillard reaction doesn’t occur to the same extent with every cooking method. Research shows that dry, high-heat methods—such as air frying, broiling, grilling, and roasting—create the ideal conditions for AGEs to form.
That’s because dry heat evaporates moisture from food, allowing its temperature to exceed the boiling point of water. The higher temperatures speed up the chemical reactions between sugars and proteins, leading to more AGE formation.
“The cooking method makes much more of a difference when you are cooking meats, and dry heat methods such as grilling, roasting, and frying can increase AGE levels by 10 to 100 times,” Katta said. “Foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are low in AGEs, so even when they are cooked at high temperatures or with dry heat, such as roasting, they contain relatively few AGEs.”
How AGEs Worsen Skin Inflammation
After you eat foods that were broiled, fried, or grilled, the dietary AGEs can interact with your gut-skin axis, a pathway that communicates between your digestive tract and your skin.
For people with psoriasis, dietary AGEs may contribute to more frequent or severe flare-ups by increasing inflammation and oxidative stress, two primary drivers of cellular damage.
The process doesn’t happen immediately after a meal. Instead, AGEs can disrupt the balance of gut bacteria and weaken the lining of the digestive tract. This allows inflammatory compounds to enter the bloodstream, where AGEs bind to receptors called RAGE (receptors for advanced glycation end-products). That interaction activates immune pathways that promote inflammation.
Over time, AGEs can also accumulate in the skin, where they damage collagen, the protein that helps keep skin firm and hydrated. “AGEs can accelerate skin aging by making our collagen more brittle and harder to repair,” Katta said.
In healthy skin, the immune system can usually resolve this inflammation and repair damaged tissue. But psoriasis is an autoimmune disease that places a lot of stress on immune function. The additional inflammation linked to AGEs may stimulate an already overactive immune system, causing skin cells to multiply too quickly and leading to the thick, itchy plaques characteristic of psoriasis.
Psoriasis-Friendly Ways to Prepare Food
If you have psoriasis, you don’t necessarily need to overhaul your diet or stop eating grilled foods. Instead, experts recommend making small changes that can help reduce your exposure to dietary AGEs, especially if you notice your symptoms worsen after eating foods cooked with dry, high heat.
Jaime Uribarri, MD, an AGEs researcher and professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, explained that meat tends to contain the highest levels of AGEs, but that doesn’t mean you need to avoid it.
“When you choose to eat lean meat, be sure it hasn’t been cooked with a high-temperature method, such as broiling or frying,” Uribarri said. “Meats containing more moisture tend to be lower in AGEs, so a good way to prepare them is with a moist heat cooking method such as boiling, stewing, or poaching.”
Uribarri also recommends marinating meat in acids like lemon or tomato juice before cooking. “Low pH decreases the formation of AGEs, while high pH has the opposite effect,” he said.
There are also other easy tips to reduce AGEs:
- Cook meat at lower temperatures or reduce grilling time
- Choose proteins that cook quickly, such as fish, seafood, or chicken breast
- Swap beef burgers for veggie burgers, which naturally contain fewer AGEs
- Wrap meat in aluminium foil patches while grilling to help retain moisture
