According to the National Cancer Institute, if you eat 2.5 ounces of red meat every week, cooked rare or medium rare, you increase your risk of colon cancer and rectum by 10 percent. If you prefer your meat well done, the lifetime risk jumps to 29 percent. The amount of risk also depends of the cooking method. Grilled steak is about twice as dangerous as pan-fried steak. You can have your steak and eat it too, without producing harmful cancer-causing compounds, research shows.
As a matter of fact,marinating meat in antioxidant-rich spice blends can reduce the risk of these heterocyclic amines forming by more than 80 percent. If you are concerned about carcinogens, marinating a product, and this would be any kind of muscle food product, is a good way to dramatically reduce the formation of HCAs. HCAs are suspected human carcinogens produced in muscle foods that have been cooked at high temperatures.
HCAs are created when heat acts on amino acids and creatinine in animal muscle. Barbecuing produces the most HCAs, followed by pan-frying and broiling. Poaching, baking, stir-frying, and stewing produce the least HCAs. I like to barbecue a few times during the summer, but then I will generally bake my meat after that.