What about fry cooks in this country? Thirty years in a McDonald’s? They are not using unrefined Chinese rapeseed oil.
During my year as a fry cook I discovered that it was great for easing sinus congestion and cough. May have been the steam from the carbonated water we poured on the grill to clean it but I don’t think the oil vapor hurt.
“What about fry cooks in this country?”
What about sailors that worked with asbestos?
It takes decades for the damage done by carcinogens to come to the fore.
“Thirty years in a McDonald’s? They are not using unrefined Chinese rapeseed oil.”
Rapeseed oil is canola oil.
McDonalds is probably using soybean oil or canola oil. Both contain linolenic acid, which is pointed to as the cancer culprit in this study.
As far as the deep fryers go, very little of their surface area is exposed, while in wok cooking a large percentage of the vegetable oil is aerosolized. In fact, using a wok at the right temperature a lot of that aerosol is supposed to burst into flame to give the food a smoky flavor or "wok breath" as the Chinese call it.
From another study linked at this article at Pubmed:
“Condensates of volatile emissions from rapeseed [canola] and soybean cooking oils were prepared and found to be genotoxic in short-term tests”
There are literally dozens of research papers at Pubmed that come to the same conclusion: your years as a fry cook may lead you to have cancer one day.
Could a primary causal factor of their cancer be not from the oil but the type of pan they were using? I know a lady who used a type of crock pot made from China. She used it almost exclusively in cooking her daughter’s meals until the daughter tested positive for lead poisoning. The state health agency tested everything in her house and found the culprit was the crock pot. The materials used and the way it was constructed caused it to be dangerous.