I just got an email from a friend with some astounding news. Check this out: carb-rich foods cooked at a high temperature (such as bread, crackers, fried potatoes and biscuits) contain a high amount of acrylamide, which has been shown to cause breast cancer in laboratory animals. Now that is scary.

But nature always seems to provide a simple cure. In this case it’s rosemary. A Danish study testing the effect of antioxidants on acrylamides found that even a small amount of rosemary added to dough before baking it reduced acrylamide content up to 60%. So the lesson is, if you bake your own bread, add rosemary. There’s no conclusive evidence that it works with frying potatoes, but hey, it tastes great, so you might as well.

Image: jeff_w_brooktree