People all over Taiwan may be starting to break out their barbecue grills for today's Mid-Autumn Festival, but more and more research is showing that burnt meat can cause cancer, and gasses released during grilling can contain the toxic chemical dioxin.
Lee Ching-jung (林青蓉), a nutritionist at Taipei Medical University, said people should steam or bake their food beforehand to reduce the amount of grilling time.
Cutting thinner pieces of meat and slicing small openings in sausages can reduce grilling time as well, she said.
Different kinds of food should not be put on the same skewer to avoid burning some items while trying to grill slower-cooking ones she said, adding that foods should be kept at least 15cm above the charcoal and grilled slowly over a low heat to keep from becoming burned.
Sprinkling cooked meat with lemon juice or other fruits and vegetables high in vitamin C can prevent the formation of some cancer-causing chemicals, she said.
A sheet of tinfoil placed over the grill will prevent potentially cancer-causing chemicals from contaminating the meat, Lee said.
Research has shown that grilling for two hours releases as much dioxin into the air as 22 cigarettes. As a result, nutritionists recommend not cooking on a grill for more than one hour at a time.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide