What exactly does the process of frying a food break down to make it unhealthy? Does the opposite happen to unhealthy foods when fried (i.e. an Oreo)?
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Are you asking if frying an Oreo makes it healthy?
Frying isn’t inherently unhealthy nor does it make the food unhealthy.
I think we are getting to an extreme point of blame shifting. Healthiness and unhealthiness has got to do as much with the subject (ie who is consuming it) as it does with the object (what is consumed). The “healthiest” food is not healthy if consumed in large amounts frequently. Even “unhealthy” foods introduce few issues if eaten in reasonable amounts when the person eating it is active and exercises.
Having said that
a) Frying is a high temperature process. Done incorrectly, it can break down certain materials into harmful byproducts. The obvious one being that it can burn food. Whereas cooking can increase the digestibility of foods (cooked rice is more digestible than raw rice), it can also chemically change the property of certain foods to make it less digestible and nutritious. For example, certain vitamins are destroyed at high temperatures.
b) Frying is typically defined as cooking in high temperature oil. Oil itself contains nutritional product, mainly fat. Even done properly, frying introduces more fat into the food. Whether this is healthy depends a lot on the total dietary consumption.
Frying oreos isn’t likely to make it more healthy. Starting with a calorie dense, high sugar, high fat food and adding more calories and fat isn’t going to improve its nutritional content.
Frying means heating the food in oil. Some of the oil absorbs and gets eaten. That oil (fat) makes the food have more calories and the same nutrition, which unless you are underfed equates to “less healthy”.
And no, adding fry oil calories to an Oreo does not make it more healthy.
What is considered unhealthy about deep fried food is the high amount of fat. To deep fry a food, that food is usually coated in a dough or breading (which is adding carbs to the food) and then submerged in hot oil, causing the dough/breading to become soaked with fat.
Whether you fry an Oreo or a piece of broccoli doesn’t matter – in the process, fat and carbs are added to it which makes it more unhealthy than it was before.
This isn’t saying that fat and carbs by itself are unhealthy, it’s about how much of these things we eat.
It’s not the frying (ie heating) that makes food unhealthy is the oil it’s fried in, which raises cholesterol and blocks your arteries causing strain on your heart over time.
So it isn’t so much that you’re breaking down the food. For the most part you will still get the nutrition from fried food that you would get for baking or other cooking.
The issue is you typically fry food in oil adding a lot of extra calories as well as typically adding flour or some sort of breading which again adds even more calories
So baked chicken would have
140 calories and 21 grams of protein per 100 grams
That same 100g of chicken fried
Has 100 calories from the chicken (smaller since it’s less to equal the 100 grams to make room for breading and oil)
100 calories from breading
150 from the oil it’s fried in
And that 18 grams of protein (again smaller piece of chicken since the breading and oil add weight)
Coming out to 390 calories and still only 18 grams of protein.
I’m not sure I understand your question about oreos.
But when you fry food you are soaking it in oil, which adds a lot of calories.
There isn’t anything special or magical about this. It just means you are basically eating *more food* and since in the developed world most of us are already eating to much food that is unhealthy.
It’s the same as saying “if I add a stick of butter to this salad it’s unhealthy” doesn’t have anything to do with breaking down the salad. It’s just that you are a stick of butter.
It breaks down nothing different than usual cooking, but you are literally cooking it in oil. The food absorbs a decent bit of said oil, and makes it significantly less healthy for you. No you cannot make an unhealthy food healthier by coating it in breading and dipping it in boiling cooking oil, it just makes it even more unhealthy.
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