The Maillard reaction. From nutritional problems to preventive medicine.

The questions we were asked by Dr Edeas, president of the French Society of Antioxidants to discuss in this introductory lecture are the following: (a) the metabolism of glycation; (b) what are its consequences at the cellular level, and (c) their effect on health. As a recent and vast literature is available on these subjects, in the following we present a short survey of some basic data on the proposed subjects, insisting on our own experiments on the cytotoxicity of Maillard products and on a new approach to prevent the aggravation and acceleration of age-related diseases, essentially diabetes type II and its consequences on the cardiovascular system. (c) 2009 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.