Dr Michelle Davenport says her grandmother is 95 and doesn’t have one wrinkles. Skin smooth as a dewdrop. She came to America from Vietnam and attributes her youthful complexion to rarely, if ever, eating out at restaurants: not on birthdays, anniversaries, or other special occasions.
“She always told me, ‘Never go out to eat, eating out is super bad for you,’” Davenport says on the other end of a Zoom call. “So we always had to cook at home. And when she cooked, it was always water-based: steamed meat, stews and lots of vegetables.”
Davenport, 39, is a scientist and registered dietitian based in San Francisco whose work focuses on slowing the harmful effects of aging. She claims this can be achieved by cooking primarily with stock and water. On her Instagram pagewhich has nearly 200,000 followers, you’ll find recipes for dishes like collagen-rich oxtail phở, green curry salmon, steamed eggs, and gà hải nam (the Vietnamese version of Hainan chicken, a recipe passed down straight from grandma).
Cooking this way, she says, reduces the production of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, which are formed when foods are cooked at high dry temperatures, such as over the grill or in an air fryer.
Davenport remembers her eureka moment clearly. In 2012, she received her PhD in nutrition from New York University. “Like many Asian families, I have many relatives with a history of diabetes, especially on my mother’s side,” she says. “So I was always very interested. That’s what I wanted to study in medical school.”
In one class, a professor casually said something that changed the course of her career: “Everyone knows that AGEs in processed Western foods are killing us.” Davenport bolted upright in her seat, “I was like, um, what?”
“I had never heard anything like that before. And then… he never said anything about it again,” she says, laughing. “But I started looking into the subject and I thought, ‘Oh my God. How come no one is talking about this?’”
What are AGEs?
Advanced glycation end products are a group of compounds that form when proteins or lipids are exposed to sugars. People regularly encounter them in the Western diet, where they are typically generated during the cooking process via the Maillard reaction, or when food is blown over high heat. (Think: the crust of a good steak.) Many ultra-processed foods, like cheese puffs and breakfast cereals, are also prepared this way.
Once in the body, AGEs do two things. They can crosslink with a protein, which causes plaque buildup in the body. This can clog blood vessels and reduce healthy blood flow. Or they cause inflammation through receptor binding. Therefore, researchers consider AGEs as a powerful biomarker for oxidative stress, which causes cell and tissue damage and inflammation.
There has been a quiet abundance of it over the past decade scientific literature This suggests that AGEs are the common denominator of many modern health problems. “We and others have shown that a diet high in AGEs is associated with the development of many chronic, non-communicable diseases that plague the modern Western world,” explains Dr. Jaime Uribarri, a nephrologist and researcher at the Mount Sinai. including insulin resistance, obesity, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, dementia and cancer.”
Davenport eventually wrote her NYU dissertation on the subject (Uribarri was one of her advisors) and quickly realized that certain types of Asian cooking methods – such as the recipes her grandmother taught her – were well suited to minimizing AGE levels. “In principle, AGEs are responsible for total body aging,” says Davenport, “but it’s crazy that it all comes down to these compounds that are so easily preventable.”
“Most of the negative effects of so-called ultra-processed foods are related to their AGE content,” says Uribarri. It has been shown that the introduction of an AGE-restricted diet, “which is achieved mainly by changing the culinary technique and not the content of the food”, staff with many of the biomarkers of disease.
How to Minimize AGEs
As Davenport explains, there are two main ways to dramatically reduce the amount of AGEs in food.
The first is the use of water and stock for cooking, which inhibits the Maillard reaction. “While chefs try to get everything as dry as possible to get that sear, I do the opposite,” says Davenport.
The second method is the use of acid for marinades, especially in meat. “I mean, sometimes I want grilled food,” Davenport says. “Like the 4th of July, I wouldn’t eat soup.”
So when you throw meat on the grill, “research shows that even if you marinate for just 15 minutes, the number of AGEs still decreases significantly,” she says. “It’s a very simple solution.” One of Davenport’s most popular recipes, for example steak with chimichurri sauceuses this technique.
Davenport, who founded a food startup focused on healthy kids’ meals, then sold it in 2019 and decided to start posting recipes designed to minimize AGEs on Instagram. From then on it just kind of snowballed. “Last year, when I started, I thought: who wants to hear about soup? That’s so boring,” she said.
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“I feel like my cooking style is kind of dirty,” she adds. ‘I see Real up into the flesh. Not everyone wants to touch oxtail. It’s a bit gagging.”
She suspects part of the reason her work resonates is because it appeals to a broad audience, not just the Asian diaspora or people who practice yoga six days a week. “I think a lot of people in the world cook this way, especially in Europe and Africa,” she says. “I get so many random messages from people saying, ‘Oh yeah, we had stew or oxtail soup like that too.’”
Is there a limit to the number of AGEs you should consume per day?
“There are no clear guidelines on exactly how much of these AGEs you should consume per day, but I try to keep it as low as possible,” she says. “Some people say less than 15,000 AGE units, and there are databases out there, but in general I feel like if I’m cooking mostly water-based most of the time, then every now and then (it’s okay) I’ll go to an American restaurant where the menu is all AGE stuff. I’m not going to worry about it too much.” (For example, a cooked steak contains roughly 10,000 AGE kU/Ls, or kilo units per liter. Marinating a steak cuts that AGE number in half.)
Davenport does most of the cooking at home for her husband and two young children. She endorses the 80/20 rule: mostly ‘healthy’, while leaving some room for fun things.
But how does she deal with cooking with children, who are often picky eaters?
“Luckily they like soups and stews,” she says. “We had a hot pot the other day. It’s cool because they can choose what they want there, and it’s fun for them to learn how to cook things.
Her husband, a surgeon from Hawaii, can be a little more challenging: “He’s so American. He just always wants to barbecue.”
Davenport does not claim that reducing AGE intake is the only or most important health metric, but rather another part of the health equation. “I’m not saying (my method) is a panacea,” she says. “This is just something to think about.”
She doesn’t consider herself an influencer; Unlike others in healthcare, the academic in her is strict about citing her sources. But she’s glad her recipes and methods are resonating with people interested in their health and eating habits.
“I’m not a biohacker,” she shrugs. “I’m more of a grandma who cooks soups and stuff.”