Why does frying food make it unhealthy?
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It isn’t unhealthy, necessarily. Anything in excess is bad for you, but eating fried food isn’t inherently bad. Oil contains fat and when you fry something in oil, especially if it’s absorbent, it will increase its fat content. If you eat a bunch of fried chicken all the time, it will likely contribute to negative health outcomes. If you eat it a few times a month it likely won’t.
The bigger issue is if you use oils high is trans fats, and you use oil that isn’t meant for high heat. Ingesting trans fat is bad, and ingesting food cooked in low heat oils could increase your risk of consuming carcinogens and free radicals.
Frying food involves cooking it in varying amounts of oil.
Whatever you cook, in whatever amount of oil, the food will absorb the oil thus making it less healthy.
Not all oil is specifically *unhealthy*. Oils like olive oil and avocado oil are good for you if eaten in dips and dressings, but are still very calorific.
To fry something you completely drown it in oil.
The fat from the oil isn’t going to magically disappear.
You’re eating all that oil so you turn into an oil tank.
When you fry food you’re cooking food in a liquid greater than the boiling point of water AND in a highly conductive environment of a liquid. (So even though an oven is 200C+ air is not a good conductor of heat.)
This temperature means that the water in the food starts to boil and pushes out from the food. This stops the item you’re frying from just becoming a big pile of oil.
So food that’s fried can have not as much oil that you would think it would.
Heating vegetable oil above certain temperature destroys it and produces many harmful chemicals that are bad for you. Either grill your food or fry it on animal fats at lower temps. Avoid vegetable oil like the plague.
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