Why does frying food make it unhealthy?
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1 cup of russet potatoes is 118 calories.
Frying in oil brings that up to 312 calories.
Add in the fact that fried foods are hyper palatable, making it easy to consume larger portions than necessary, and you have a much higher chance of eating far more calories than your body uses. Those calories are stored as fat. Excess body fat may lead to all sorts of negative health outcomes.
Due to how the body metabolizes two products of frying: Glycated End Products and Saturated Fats – this leads to a lot of radical oxygen species in your body which then target DNA and proteins in ways we don’t want them to. Also, saturated fats accumulate in your body but I don’t remember why, I think it was that it clogs vasculature. ELI5: fats and protein changes during cooking are hard for the body to break down, and in the process releases other molecules that damage cells.
Edits: grammar
Edit2 : clarification in eli5
Because most fried foods are now cooked in highly processed, hydrogenated oils such as:
Vegetable oil
Canola oil
Cottonseed oil
Safflower oil
Sunflower oil
Foods fried in tallow, lard, butter, olive oil (at lower temps) are much better for you.
***Coming from a 58kg, fit and healthy female
Good posts so far, but also high temperature cooking, especially frying, creates a chemical called acrylamide. There was a bit of a furor about it in the early 2000’s, it may cause cancer in high quantities. [The FDA doesn’t seem too worried about it.](https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamide-questions-and-answers)
Okay, imagine food like potatoes or chicken. When we fry them, we cook them in hot oil. That hot oil can soak into the food and make it greasy.
Now, our bodies need some fat, but too much of it can be bad, like eating too many sweets. When we eat too much greasy fried food, it can make us gain weight and raise our cholesterol.
Also, when food is fried, it can lose some of its natural nutrients. So, while it might taste yummy, eating too much fried food isn’t the healthiest choice.
…I’m seeing a lot of answers saying “because you’re making it a lot greasier!” etc, etc, etc.
And they’re all wrong.
Fats are not created equal. There are good fats (Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) and bad fats (saturated and trans).
The high heat at which food is fried changes the chemical composition of the fats. So healthy fats heated to these temperatures makes them in to unhealthy fats, which in turn have negative effects on your body.
Furthermore, foods prepared this way have a tendency to already be not great for you. So you’re eating bad food that’s been cooked in bad fats. And that’s why fried food is typically unhealthy.
There is no such thing as an unhealthy food, there are only unhealthy diets.
Nothing wrong with having fried food once in a while if you don’t have any medical condition that would make it unhealthy for you.
What can be unhealthy is to have fried food all the time (because you will probably have too much saturated fat).
French fries have twice the calories of mashed potatoes, per ounce.
And potatoes are mainly nutritious for their calories.
Frying just adds an unreasonable amount of calories to your diet. Beyond that, you only need a certain amount of fat. Anything past that could cause issues.
If you need to know if you’re eating too much fat, figure out how much fat is in something, then consider drinking that much olive oil or butter straight. Does the thought make you gag? Maybe go lighter then.
Sugar industry pushed “fat bad” narrative in 90s to distract from the negative effects of sugar.
Putting aside that oils tend to be high in calories, a lot of it really has to do with the type of oils your food is being prepared with. Vegetable oils and seed oils are cheaper to buy, which is why they are very commonly used in foods, snacks, restaurants, fast food chains, etc. These oils are getting lot of scrutiny based on research showing our bodies inability to break down these oils effectively, which then builds up in our bodies, causing build up in our arteries etc. If you google vegetable or canola oils, you easily find a rabbit hole to go down. However, this is not to say that not all oils are bad, and there are other high-heat oils that you can use that are perfectly fine to use, such as ghee, avocado oil or coconut oil. Extra virgin olive oil also gets a good rap, but more for dressings, not high heat cooking. These oils are more expensive, hence, why someone on a fast food diet may be more prone to heart disease. Fast food chains aren’t using avocado oil to fry their fries, along with other businesses, simply because it’s too expensive. And, not enough studies to show vegetable oils is directly correlated to heart disease.
There are arguments that fried food is unhealthy because people that eat lots of fried food tend to be overweight and have heart disease. But, it may actually relate to the type of oil being used. Dr. Hyman is one who talks about the dangers of vegetable/seed oils, and speaks to legit, published studies. You’d be surprised on how many things contain these oils, and how little we know how it impacts the body.
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