The main purpose of this review is to clarify whether the consumption of food rich in melanoidins and dietary advanced glycosylation end-products (dAGEs) is harmful or beneficial for human health. There are conflicting results on their harmful effects in the literature, partly due to a methodological issue in how dAGEs are determined in food. Melanoidins have positive functions particularly within the gastrointestinal tract, whereas the intake of dAGEs has controversial physiological consequences. Most of the in vivo intervention trials were done comparing boiled versus roasted diet (low and high dAGE, respectively). However, these studies can be biased by different lipid oxidation and by different calorie density of foods in the two conditions. The attraction that humans have to cooked foods is linked to the benefits they have had during mankind's evolution. The goal for food technologists is to design low-energy-dense products that can satisfy humans' attraction to rewarding cooked foods.
Keywords: CML; Maillard reaction; diabetes; dietary AGEs; food design; inflammation; insulin resistance; melanoidins; protein glycation.