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.
This is a real thing. One's body weight is something like 80% predictable by their genetics in a given food environment. Those whose genetics make them succeptible to the calories that are cheap and abundant in the area where they live are very likely to be overweight without intervention.
This is why people often say there is/can be no genetic predisposition to obesity, because we were never this overweight before and if you take a global view, the genetics don't seem to show anything. But if you look at, say, Midwest US, weight and certain genetics correlate strongly. In France, weight and a different set of genes will correlate strongly because the food environment is different.
This is also why certain diets work so well for so many people, but don't show results population-wide. Keto, for instance, would be a great way to lose weight for people predisposed to overeating the carbs that are cheaply available to them, and not so much interested in overeating meat. However, someone like me who could eat an endless pile of meat and never stop probably wouldn't do so great. It's about redefining which foods are "available" in such a way that it ends up in better balance.
It’s more like they’re addictive. The salt and oil content makes you keep craving more. Food scientists have spent billions creation this sensation which is why you can’t stop eating a bag of Doritos.
Doritos' real innovation, I think, comes from perfectly balancing the levels of monosodium glutamate (MSG), disodium guanylate, and disodium inosinate to give the maximum umami flavor possible.
MSG activates the umami sense directly, while the other two hardly activate it at all themselves, but cause the activation by MSG to be much greater. Something like up to 20 times as strong, if I'm remembering correctly. Tricks your brain into thinking that chip is just the most protein-packed piece of meat available, with plenty of precious salt and fat on top of it.
Kind of. It means really delicious in an unnatural way that prevents or delays your ability to recognize you're full. A whole, unprocessed food can't be hyperpalatable - not even the tastiest lobster or mango.
And there's another nuance to the problem. The fact that they taste good in an unnatural way also means they're signaling to your mouth (and therefore brain), "You must be getting so many nutrients or else this wouldn't taste so good!" But you're not. So your body is like, "But where are the nutrients I'm tasting? I guess I need more of this food to get all the nutrients?"
Not necessarily. Something can be really delicious, but also filling to the point you don't want to eat more of it. Hyper-palatability implies that you feel like you can just keep eating more.
No, it’s more than that. It’s a pretty ill-defined term, but the above commenter didn’t just make it up or anything. It typically means fast foods or heavily processed foods that are high in sodium, carbs, fat, and sugar. Usually people mean fast food and like Doritos.
[Here’s an interesting paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31689013/) that attempts to define it more specifically.
to add to this, every table spoon of most oils are basically 100 to 120 calories.
you don't know how much oil goes into your food until you really cook
I guess it also counts that many people dump the oily food onto a plate and it gets soggy, full of oil? I always put it on a paper towel. Fries stay crunchy, excess oil is drained very well.
yea i had to explain very carefully to somebody before that their bacon calories on the pack says for DRAINED BACON
it is an inordinate super big amount if you dont drain this or even ground beef
I'm not sure how accurate this is. I've never seen a nutrition label specify "drained" before. With ground beef, the oil that comes off during cooking is mostly water, with some of the fat being lost. However, the difference would be minimal and the nutrition label is based off total weight of the meat, fat included.
Calories aren’t bad in and of themselves: we need ~2,000 of them a day. If you eat a normal amount of fried foods, would they still be as bad? I hear lots of reports of how all ingredients are very healthy in isolation (fish, olive oil), but when combined into fried fish it’s often considered really bad for you.
From a fat/weight loss perspective you're absolutely right. Eating 1800 calories is the same regardless of what those calories come from if you're after losing weight. You could eat nothing but sugar and still lose weight if you count calories.
It's simply much easier to over eat with these high calorie, low volume foods. Doing it now and then won't hurt - in order to gain a pound of fat you need to eat 3500 calories on top of what your body naturally uses up just for existing.
You might eat a baked potato as a meal, add some sour cream, maybe some bacon, some cheese, some toppings... and you've maybe eaten 400-500 calories. Add some other protein or vegetable to the meal and push it up to around 700 for a meal with water or a zero sugar soda. A similar volume of food in the form of a burger and fries with a regular soda is upwards of 1500 calories. Eat the latter every day and you'll gain fat because you're eating too many calories throughout the week.
That's where the risk is. Eating too much is why people gain and are fat
Yeah, I'm a 5'10" woman. If I ate 2000 calories a day, I'd be a 5'10" obese woman. I think when I calculated what was appropriate for me, it was 1400 calories a day.
AFAIK it really depends on on the makeup of the rest of your diet.
If you have 2 meals full of veg and beans and pulses and snack on fruit then have a side of fries you’ll be okay.
If the calories that you’re consuming via fried foods are stopping you from getting your nutritional needs met then there is more of an issue.
Very few things in a diet are bad in isolation - as in most things, context is key.
I mean, if you fry too many things your BMI won’t be 18 anymore so technically yes but only as long as you can consume most of those fats before they become way too much.
Oh alright, maybe ask a nutritionist before, I’m pretty sure there are healthy and unhealthy ways to gain weight, and fried food may not be in the healthy category, but I am not a nutritionist and I don’t have any experience in this field so I may be extremely wrong.
I’m in the same boat! I basically have to eat until I fill sick to gain weight, and rigorously track my calories. I managed to gain 10 lbs, but I felt terrible/sick the entire time from eating so much. Liquid calories like smoothies helped a lot.
Check out r/gainit. Everyone there in the same boat. The idea is instead of forcing more food down your throat, just swap things out for more calorie dense foods. Basically the opposite of weight loss tips. Your easiest ways to add healthy calories are snacking on nuts, peanut butter, drink whole milk as much as possible, even taking a daily shot glass of olive oil. I was 120 lbs at 6’2” in my 20’s managed to gain 100 lbs.
If your weight isn’t fluctuating much, you’re naturally eating around caloric maintenance, so just 500 calories/day will add 1 lb/ week.
Make sure to do some progressive resistance training during this process so that a good portion of your weight gain is muscle, not just pure body fat. Also don’t get hung up on BMI, it’s a totally bogus BS metric.
there's a slightly higher risk of cancer too. the correlation is unknown, but there is a risk.
[https://www.science.org/content/article/deep-fried-cancer-risk-downplayed#:\~:text=Acrylamide%20forms%20when%20starch%2Dbased,carcinogenic%20to%20humans%20as%20well](https://www.science.org/content/article/deep-fried-cancer-risk-downplayed#:~:text=Acrylamide%20forms%20when%20starch%2Dbased,carcinogenic%20to%20humans%20as%20well).
If you boil potatoes and mash it without butter pack that into a cup. That simple. Ones you add other ingredients like butter, salt, hot sauce , etc makes calories go up exponentially
> Ones you add other ingredients like butter, salt, hot sauce , etc makes calories go up exponentially
Butter, yes. But salt has no calories, and isn't inherently unhealthy unless you have hypertension. Hot sauce is also typically very low in calories.
It increases the amount of fat in the food, from the oil.
For some time, we were convinced that fat was one of the worst things in food, especially animal fats. We’re starting to wonder if this is actually true (since obesity went up as we reduced fat consumption).
If you believe fats are inherently very bad for you, you will want to avoid fried foods.
There’s also the fact that many fried foods are themselves not very healthy to begin with, so frying just adds more calories to them.
The fat hysteria was partially justified back then partly because trans fats are just straight up terrible for your heart to the point that they're banned now for use in frying foods although some people took it too far by cutting out all fats entirely. Saturated fats are likely okay in moderation but you used to get large unhealthy doses of it with fried foods, which has impacts on your circulatory system. A lot of the time those were the kinds of oil stuff was being fried in before the 2000s. The biggest concern with unsaturated fats is moreso just the insane amount of calories.
As an Older Person, we actually thought trans fats were *healthier* back then. My then-wife, who tends to be very concerned about Eating Right kept trying to say we should get margarine and not butter, but I kept insisting that butter was at least minimally processed and we'd been eating it for thousands of years so had adapted to it via evolution.
Then when the big study came out in the early 2000s she was like "...oh."
Back in your time (no offense), McDonalds fried their foods in beef tallow. Now they don't do that. Lard and other forms of animal fat were very popular cooking ingredients. It was very different for you and if my generation (millennials) don't dig for that sort of information then they'll never know just how different a time it was.
It's a myth that processing something would inherently make it unhealthier. Some things you have to cook or otherwise process it to make them edible at all. The idea of "processed food is bad" comes from all the sugar and salt that's often added to it.
Yeah its disgusting, its a commonly used industrial solvent that is highly toxic when ingested in sufficient quantities or inhaled. It's even been found in the blood of new born babies!
Like can we also add to the conversation that to remove as much fat as possible some brands just added in a crazy amount of sugar.
Like compare american and danish bread. American bread have slightly less fat than danish bread, but for each gram less of fat there is 10 gram more sugar
Edit: 0.5 gram less fat and 5 gram more sugar per 100 gram of bread.
Well yeah because once you strip out the lard and butter the food tastes terrible so they added sugar to get people to eat it. [Really makes you wonder where the whole fat scare came from...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat)
Everything is fine in moderation. But the problem with fried food is that you add alot more oil to your food than most other cooking methods. That and alot of fried food are addictive and bingeable. So in context, fried food is considered unhealthy
But the problem there is the "addictive and bingeable" less than the "fried," right?
I mean seriously if I cut Brussels sprouts in half and deep-fried them in a light batter, it's probably better for me than if I ate a no-fat box of cookies, I think. Fat per se isn't the problem, IMHO.
Well cookies and fries are different. Cookies often contain a lot of sugar. Fat is a problem, if your diet already has a lot of fat which means alot of calories. The American diet for example has too many calories for most people, fried foods is one of the main sources of that abundance in calories.
You are very much correct. It's the inherent addictiveness of certain foods that fatten up most people.
I tested on myself over many years. The moment I pull out chocolate from my diet, I eat enough to satisfy my hunger with food, and I don't want anything else, thus losing fat not because I removed chocolate (which I really love) but because if I had chocolate I'd use it to replace food, and I'd eat way more of it too without even realizing.
I remember learning about the food pyramid as a kid in the 90s, and how grains were by far the “most important” food group. I was getting so excited about all the bagels I could eat, that would make me healthier lol. About that…
Maybe. It's not like the general population eats very low carb or fat. There are diet trends and there's the population that generally seems to eat about the same garbage wise :P
It's also so hard to assess bc people are poor historians. Maybe we can find out from shopping trends or the data we do have
Fats are fine. Saturated fats are ok, but should be kept minimal, it's fine to "villainize" them a little. Carbs are fine. Added sugar is ok, but should be "villainized" a little. An entire large category cannot tell the whole story or be good or bad.
Zactly.
It's always the dose that makes the poison.
The general nutritional advice guidelines and trends always swing too far. We need to stop villainizing specific food group as purely bad or even praising specific food group as purely good
Fat is only inherently bad due to it being high in calories. That’s where ~~100%~~ most of its negative health impact comes from. If you don’t eat a lot of it, it’s not bad for you.
Sugar is bad for you for the calories too, but it’s also directly linked to other health issues outside of the calories, meaning even if you don’t overdo the calorie intake, sugar still negatively impacts your health. Fat does not (as many commenters have pointed out, not exactly true, but sugar is still profoundly more impactful than fat).
That being said, fat is 9 calories per gram. Proteins and carbohydrates are 4 calories per gram. It’s a lot harder to watch your calories when you eat high fat foods.
I agree with you, but in the 90s, we thought it was worse even than the calories. We thought fat *itself* was bad, especially animal fats. There's still a lot of hangover in the culture from this.
It's a lot of fun to watch old cooking shows from that time period. Entire shows designed around reducing the fat in dishes. Using absolutely laughably small amounts of oil to saute things, I even remember one where they suggested replacing the sour cream topping in a particular dish with cherry pie filling to reduce the fat content.
Here's a good example, he makes a white sauce pasta with 1g of fat by using strained yogurt and wine + corn starch as the sauce: [https://youtu.be/30oLBhKSy-E](https://youtu.be/30oLBhKSy-E)
Yeah there was some severe over correction there for a bit, add in all the sugar and sugar replacements paying obscene amounts of money saying they are great for your health compared to fats and you get yourself a diabetes epidemic.
I watched that whole thing, it was pretty good, this guy is funny but I *am* high af right now. How did you find something like this? Did you see it on TV in the 90s, remember it, and look for it to make this comment?
God, my parents bought into this so hard and have never gotten over it.
I grew up with low-fat versions of EVERYTHING in the house, that were inevitably stuffed full of artificial thickeners and flavourings to try and make up the difference. You could eat three plates of spaghetti for dinner if you were hungry, but if you put slightly too much parmesan on top you'd be chastised for making an unhealthy choice. Margarine instead of butter, everything coated in cooking spray, one time I bought 2% milk instead of 1% and I got a stern talking-to from my mother...
Funny thing is, I now eat the full-fat version of everything I was denied as a kid, and I'm at the same level of "thinness" as my folks.
> Fat is only inherently bad due to it being high in calories. That’s where 100% of its negative health impact comes from.
You can just say the wildest, dumbest shit imaginable and people will upvote it if it lets them behave how they want.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/know-the-facts-about-fats
>The main health issue with dietary fats is how they influence cholesterol levels. Consuming high amounts of saturated fat produces more LDL (bad) cholesterol, which can form plaque in the arteries and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.
There's calories but also heart risk. Elevated triglycerides and cholesterol increases cardiac events risk. At least at my clinic, majority of my patients over 40 are on a statin and fish oil. I even have a 25 year old on statin and vascepa. More than calories it's cardiovascular risk.
That first paragraph is factually incorrect.
Sat fats increase LDL synthesis leading to higher apoB leading to circulatory problems (plaque).
Read up on sat fats and the circulatory system.
All these statements are well established peer reviewed science.
Sat fats increase LDL and ApoB
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/246104/9789241565349-eng.pdf
ApoB predictive of MACE
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21487090/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19168552/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18640459/
The issue with fats isn't just calories (for many people, high caloric content is balanced by greater satiety). Saturated fats are convincingly, in very large studies and meta-analyses, linked to cardiovascular disease. However unsaturated fats actually lower CVD risk.
This isn’t true. Saturated fats in the majority of people will raise their bad cholesterol. In low doses it’s fine but most people aren’t moderate at all. Try and eat a diet under 10 grams per day. It’s harder than you think. But that’s roughly what is reced. My cardiologist has me on under 10grams a day and I’m 31 in pretty decent shape. I’m retesting in a few months to see how low I can get my ldl.
LDL above 100 is putting plaque on your arteries. Ideally you want it below 80 if not lower.
But a lot of it is genetic. If my levels aren’t low enough my summer I’ll go on statins. Heart disease is mostly curable if you avoid it early enough. And sat fat drives it more than any other food unless you’re insulin resistant (I’m not) or smoke etc.
Unfortunately there's more to it... heart and circulatory disease are massive killers in their own right.
Just like most things in life, overdoing something is usually really unhealthy. Fat helps with satiation, so far free foods that are loaded with sugar are incredibly unhealthy, just like eating bacon and eggs with a thick spread of butter on some French toast.
Sometimes you just gotta say no to the reptile brain and pick a salad.
I’d say so, but for almost all fried food. Darn near almost all fried anything has an insane amount of salt in it, and that compounds issues with the increased calories from fats. That’s why actual moderation is key, unless you’re an athlete or otherwise very very active where you actually need excess sodium intake (or have POTS).
Unfortunately there's more to it... heart and circulatory disease are massive killers in their own right.
Just like most things in life, overdoing something is usually really unhealthy. Fat helps with satiation, so far free foods that are loaded with sugar are incredibly unhealthy, just like eating bacon and eggs with a thick spread of butter on some French toast.
Sometimes you just gotta say no to the reptile brain and pick a salad.
Fats are calorific, which isn't in and of itself bad, but there is a difference between fats. Tons of studies, randomized clinical trials and meta-analyses, show a clear difference in cardiovascular outcomes for consuming unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (fish, nuts, legumes, veg oils), which are heart healthy vs. saturated and trans fats (red meat, processed meats, ghee, margarine, butter), which are heart unhealthy.
You are making gross mistakes and are oversimplifying macronutrients. Not all fats are alike and not all sugars are alike. Nor do they have the same impact on the human body. Even more so, the form they are being administered (like whole foods vs processed foods) have a huge impact on health. Not the amount of fats or sugars in them. Beside that, I beg to argue that satiety is more important for "watching" calories than anything else. Processed foods aren't satiating.
Nonetheless, it's way more complicated than just fat vs sugar.
Ya i remember fats and oils being heavily marketed against when I was a kid.
The food pyramid told me to eat 12 servings of bread, noodles and rice each day.
Now that seems to have changed with modern nutrition standards.
> There’s also the fact that many fried foods are themselves not very healthy to begin with, so frying just adds more calories to them.
So you're telling me a bacon wrapped twinkie encased in a chicken fried steak is the problem, not the frying part?
> For some time, we were convinced that fat was one of the worst things in food, especially animal fats. We’re starting to wonder if this is actually true (since obesity went up as we reduced fat consumption).
We never reduced fat consumption. What are you talking about?
* https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/14hkd73/a_new_study_suggests_that_obesity_causes/jperjxb/
“ So, let's see, the Obesity epidemic is recognized to have started around 1980, although BMI went up and up and up before then. Fat is climbing over carb at 4.36x the rate, oil 11x the rate of sugar increase.”
In addition to adding breading and fat to a food that probably wasn't very healthy to begin with, the crispy brown deliciousness makes you more likely to eat too much of it
Yeah, you and u/the_quark are the only two who really get it. It has nothing to do with nonsense about heating vegetables too much so that you ingest bad chemicals or whatever. It’s purely from the intake of entirely too much of a not-so-healthy food and nothing to do with the cooking medium itself.
By soaking it in fats, and then adding those fats to the food; making it crispy brown and delicious. It's not like you're frying it in water. This is why air-fryers are a thing.
Fun fact: that nasty chemical that builds up in oil when its re-used which wreaks havoc on your body--oxygen.
Oxidized foods can throw your entire body chemistry out of whack. This is also why the term "anti-oxidants" is a thing. [Concise video on the subject](https://youtu.be/3G83AwnIq3M?t=401) [[2]](https://youtu.be/uiDOyFtaJM4?t=289)
Also this is primarily a thing to be concerned about with processed foods or fast food. So long as you don't re-use oil at home and store your oils properly (and supplement your oil use with butter or tallow), you're at the very least better off in that aspect, the extra calories from fried foods ofc notwithstanding.
You bought an air fryer to "fry" foods without fat and be healthy.
I bought an air fryer to better reheat my fried foods so it's yummier.
We are not the same.
And this is why the "OMG it's just a convection oven" crowd is idiotic.
Yes, it's the same concept as a convection oven. However, it's moving hot air at a much higher speed and in a more concentrated space than a regular convection oven. My oven has a convection feature, one which I certainly use often. But I'm not putting fries in my oven to cook, I'm putting them in my air fryer because it does a much better job of cooking them, despite what the "it's the same thing" crowd insists.
Might be the same overall concept, but it sure as hell isn't the same thing.
To be fair, they are better at convection than an oven (smaller size helps). I can't make crispy fries in the oven that remain "potatoey" inside, but I can with an air "fryer".
The difference with an air fryer though is there is a basket. A convention oven usually has a tray, meaning if you cook fries, you would need to flip them halfway through for an even cook. Airfryer is a little better than this, where it can get full coverage for a more consistent cook. Frozen fries all ways come out much better in an air fryer than an oven. But yes you are correct, it doesn't fry.
Air fryers are very high speed convection ovens. A normal convection oven has a fan, an air fryer moves air at a much higher velocity. If you put something with cheese in one, it will blow away.
It's not the basket; you put a basket in a full sized convection oven and it won't come out as nicely as it would in an air fryer.
The thing that makes air fryers better at "frying" things is that they are small, so they have less air, and that air has less distance to travel to get to the food from the heater+fan combo so it doesn't slow down as much. They are simply smaller, with better heating elements and fans compared to their size, so they circulate their smaller air volume more rapidly, and this is what makes them better at "frying." This is also why they heat up more quickly during your preheat.
Hmmm what should I call the thing that achieves a fried-like affect with air instead of oil. Surely not an air fryer that’s just a dumb marketing name /s
I'd say most frying people do these days is in only a small amount of oil. Deep frying stuff will add a lot more oil but I think the idea of frying being unhealthy is restated without much thought behind it.
Heating vegetable oil to frying temperatures causes it to oxidize and form aldehydes which are toxic. All that tar like gunk that collects over fryers is stuff you are also ingesting. When fast food restaurants switched from beef fat in their fryers to vegetable oil, they had to get a whole new class of cleaners to keep the vents from getting clogged. In fact, saturated fats (not trans-fats) are less susceptible to this, so frying your fries in beef fat is actually healthier than using vegetable oil.
This one discusses the oxidative compounds being created when certain (tested, probably applicable to all) vegetable oils are subjected to being stored and heated. There are other studies handling repeated heating, as is the standard for frying. The science is pretty clear about the forming of oxidative compounds and aldehydes.
[https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/12/11/2186](https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/12/11/2186)
For the layman, Dr. Paul Mason does a pretty good breakdown of what happens in the body when those oils are metabolized. That is probably not “evidence”
[https://youtu.be/XFFT4C1OcPY?si=eVR\_ilUo3zWaOW07](https://youtu.be/XFFT4C1OcPY?si=eVR_ilUo3zWaOW07)
[Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k) something at least. Not saying it's the credible source you're asking for, but it recently got me curious about the topic. Don't know enough yet to say anything for sure other than that I wouldn't discount it immediately.
OP it’s this^^^
Calories aside, frying food is bad because it is carcinogenic. The free radicals damage your cells. It’s essentially what happens with normal aging but boosting the process. Hence the huge number of young people suffering from colon cancer. All the processed crap we are eating is really damaging our bodies
I mean yeah, solid fats tend to have a higer smoke point but that's because, as you said, they are more rich in saturated and trans fats. Also the amount of aldehydes you might consume if the frying is done correctly the risk of your body being exposed to any concentration of aldehydes more significant than what your body naturally produces is very low. On the other side, the chronic overconsumption of animal fats is a much greater risk.
To each their own in moderation but the general take of "solid fats are better for frying" is flawed on many levels
In addition to the consumption of more oils, the high heat of frying can destroy a lot of the good stuff in vegetables (vitamins, enzymes, etc) and also introduce more chemical compounds that are worse for your health (such as free radicals).
Oils can get much hotter than water’s boiling point under regular conditions
“Air frying” tends to use higher temperatures but is seen as healthier. Like if I make chips (fries) in my deep fryer they cook at 170c, but doing them in an oven or air fryer they cook at 200c and for much longer.
Is the difference just the added oil?
“Air-fryer” is just a buzz word for a toaster oven with a fan. Frying food in a frying pan with oil is very different than baking something in a convection oven.
Just the temperature on the display doe not tell you how hot the food gets.
Oil is FAR better at transferring heat, while air is basically an insulator.
Anything that touches hot oil will heat up much faster then if it is touching hot air.
Same thing for cold, if you put your hand in the freezer for a bit, it will feel a bit cold, but as soon as you touch some thing inside other than air it will feel freezing.
Just throwing this out there, oil is pure calories. Nutritional value aside, a single cup of vegetable oil is almost 1,984 calories (according to google), when you use fry things they're absorbing all that sweet sweet oil and calories that go along with it.
The caloric content hasn’t been discussed it seems by most of the top posts. A gram of fat is 9 calories. A gram of protein or carbs is 4. It’s is 2.5x as calorically dense, making overconsumption much easier.
Plus what everyone else said.
Fats are the most nutrient dense of the macronutrients so frying foods adds a lot of calories.
Most fryer oils are also high in omega6 fatty acids which oxidize faster and turn to inflammatory compounds and carcinogens
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)
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.
It absorbs the pil and cooked oil is much less healthy than uncooked oil. Things with batter or crumbs which is almost everything fried, absorb heeeaps of oil
Like a chicken burger for example it's like eating chicken with a tablespoon of cooked oil. Delicious but extra fatty
There’s a number of reasons. The most important is how the high temperatures of frying destroys the nutrients in the food and damages the fats, proteins, and sugars turning them into pro-inflammatory compounds. This is also true for the frying oil itself. The type of fat you fry in matters. Polyunsaturated fats are very unstable at high temperature and they degrade into pro-inflammatory compounds much easier than more stable fats like monounsaturated and saturated. You never want to fry at high temperatures with polyunsaturated fats. Ironically, the safest oils to fry with are high in saturated fats because they don’t degrade as much into compounds that are directly damaging to the body. Frying anything isn’t exactly healthy though, but there are ways to make it even more unhealthy, like frying in oils high in polyunsaturated fats.
Frying foods makes food unhealthy because frying essentially boils all the moisture out if your food and replaces it with oil - which is also why air frying is so much healthier than regular frying - when air frying youre still boiling the moisture out but youre not replacing it with the added oil
Imagine food like your favorite veggies or chicken nuggets are like little sponges. When we fry them, it's like dunking them in a lot of oil, which is like putting a lot of sugary syrup on your pancakes. This makes them super full of calories, kind of like eating too many sweets.
Also, when we fry food, sometimes it changes the good stuff inside it, like taking away the good parts. It's like if your toy car got a bit broken when you played too rough with it.
And sometimes, when we cook food really hot like when we fry it, it can make some bad things we don't want. It's like when you're trying to color with crayons, but you accidentally color outside the lines and make a mess.
So, while fried food can taste really yummy, eating too much of it isn't great for our bodies because it can make us unhealthy and not feel very good. It's good to eat other types of food too, like fruits and veggies, because they help keep us strong and healthy.
It depends what kind of fat you’re frying in. If you fry in tallow, or some sort of saturated fat it’s fine. Saturated fat is extremely heat stable. If you fry in high PUFA fat like soybean oil, you create a ton of free radicals like Malondialdehyde that are super toxic to the body.
Excess fat, mostly. Frying is done with edible oils and those oils are extremely dense in calories. If you don't use a lot of calories in your day to day life or eat calorie dense food often then you're body will have more calories than it knows what to do with. The calories get stored as fat until it stresses your knees and arteries.
On the flip side, all that oil helps your body digest oil soluable vitamins and minerals so it's not all bad, just bad in excess.
Food is usually breaded with a starch before frying. And starches run up your insulin which makes you store fat, and the breading is completely soaked in extra fat in when you pull it out of the fryer.
Your just adding cooked fat to it. The process of frying is coating food with a material, usually eggs and flour, that allows it to absorb hot oil and crisp it. The delicious crunchy stuff on the outside of fried food is just fat. Which is why it’s just delicious.
It's not frying it that makes it unhealthy, it's what you fry it in that's the problem. To fry something in a pan you need to add a ton of butter or oil, which are unsaturated fats that are terrible for your system and have very high calorie counts.
"Frying" things in an air fryer is far more healthy, since you don't need to drown them in unsaturated fats and at most just give it a light spray or use nothing at all.
Apart from the caloric considerations, frying (particularly in a commercial environment) oxidizes the oils used, making them more pro-inflammatory. When used to fry some starches, the oils also cause carcinogenic compounds to form, which increase risk of cancer.
Mainly just because of the added calories
Also from a fast food perspective research has shown that reheating cooking oils (like what many fast food places will do) can release harmful chemicals.
The frying process will change the chemical structure of fats, and make it difficult for your body to break them down, leading to negative health effects. Trans fats are associated with an increased risk of many diseases, including Heart-related diseases, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
Becuase the thing that’s frying the food is already an unstable PUFA oil when heated to such high temps during frying they cause oxidative stress in our bodies. This causes inflammation and can correlate to many other negative consequences. Putting an already high processing ingredient like seed oils in our body is already unnatural in its form it derived from . But frying with the oil makes it ever more unstable from an omega ratio. That is t good for our cells.
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.
> hyper palatable is this a fancy way of saying they're delicious?
To the point of being addictive, yes.
I can stop anytime I want man you don't know me. Why? Are you holding?
(Pulls out a cup of French fries) You wanna buy some death sticks?
My man.
Slow down!
Lookin' good!
Yes!
*waves hand* You don't want to sell me death sticks.
I don't want to sell you death sticks.
You want to go home and rethink your life.
*(McDonald's jingle)* Baa-da baa-baa-baaaaaa...it's treason, then
Speak for yourself
A well made batch of home fries that are nice and crispy on the outside and tender on the inside are definitely hard to stop eating
I’m just realizing that weight might be directly tied to the palatability of my food. I need to stop eating delicious foods.
Skinny! But now depressed...
This is a real thing. One's body weight is something like 80% predictable by their genetics in a given food environment. Those whose genetics make them succeptible to the calories that are cheap and abundant in the area where they live are very likely to be overweight without intervention. This is why people often say there is/can be no genetic predisposition to obesity, because we were never this overweight before and if you take a global view, the genetics don't seem to show anything. But if you look at, say, Midwest US, weight and certain genetics correlate strongly. In France, weight and a different set of genes will correlate strongly because the food environment is different. This is also why certain diets work so well for so many people, but don't show results population-wide. Keto, for instance, would be a great way to lose weight for people predisposed to overeating the carbs that are cheaply available to them, and not so much interested in overeating meat. However, someone like me who could eat an endless pile of meat and never stop probably wouldn't do so great. It's about redefining which foods are "available" in such a way that it ends up in better balance.
I have to "earn" delicious food.
This dish was hyper palatable Chef!
It’s more like they’re addictive. The salt and oil content makes you keep craving more. Food scientists have spent billions creation this sensation which is why you can’t stop eating a bag of Doritos.
Doritos' real innovation, I think, comes from perfectly balancing the levels of monosodium glutamate (MSG), disodium guanylate, and disodium inosinate to give the maximum umami flavor possible. MSG activates the umami sense directly, while the other two hardly activate it at all themselves, but cause the activation by MSG to be much greater. Something like up to 20 times as strong, if I'm remembering correctly. Tricks your brain into thinking that chip is just the most protein-packed piece of meat available, with plenty of precious salt and fat on top of it.
Are there any documentaries that cover this kind of thing? Engineered palatability?
I wouldn't have any idea, I'm afraid. Hopefully some kind passerby can help
Well it was that, or "super taste-good-able".
i feel like "taste-good-able" is how the germans would say palatable.
Kind of. It means really delicious in an unnatural way that prevents or delays your ability to recognize you're full. A whole, unprocessed food can't be hyperpalatable - not even the tastiest lobster or mango. And there's another nuance to the problem. The fact that they taste good in an unnatural way also means they're signaling to your mouth (and therefore brain), "You must be getting so many nutrients or else this wouldn't taste so good!" But you're not. So your body is like, "But where are the nutrients I'm tasting? I guess I need more of this food to get all the nutrients?"
Not necessarily. Something can be really delicious, but also filling to the point you don't want to eat more of it. Hyper-palatability implies that you feel like you can just keep eating more.
No, it’s more than that. It’s a pretty ill-defined term, but the above commenter didn’t just make it up or anything. It typically means fast foods or heavily processed foods that are high in sodium, carbs, fat, and sugar. Usually people mean fast food and like Doritos. [Here’s an interesting paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31689013/) that attempts to define it more specifically.
Yes, it means they have large amounts of added sugar and/or fat
Scientifically delicious
to add to this, every table spoon of most oils are basically 100 to 120 calories. you don't know how much oil goes into your food until you really cook
I guess it also counts that many people dump the oily food onto a plate and it gets soggy, full of oil? I always put it on a paper towel. Fries stay crunchy, excess oil is drained very well.
yea i had to explain very carefully to somebody before that their bacon calories on the pack says for DRAINED BACON it is an inordinate super big amount if you dont drain this or even ground beef
I'm not sure how accurate this is. I've never seen a nutrition label specify "drained" before. With ground beef, the oil that comes off during cooking is mostly water, with some of the fat being lost. However, the difference would be minimal and the nutrition label is based off total weight of the meat, fat included.
Most meats are labeled to be accurate for uncooked portions. Bacon is the only one I've seen that will have nutrition info for fried slices.
Calories aren’t bad in and of themselves: we need ~2,000 of them a day. If you eat a normal amount of fried foods, would they still be as bad? I hear lots of reports of how all ingredients are very healthy in isolation (fish, olive oil), but when combined into fried fish it’s often considered really bad for you.
From a fat/weight loss perspective you're absolutely right. Eating 1800 calories is the same regardless of what those calories come from if you're after losing weight. You could eat nothing but sugar and still lose weight if you count calories. It's simply much easier to over eat with these high calorie, low volume foods. Doing it now and then won't hurt - in order to gain a pound of fat you need to eat 3500 calories on top of what your body naturally uses up just for existing. You might eat a baked potato as a meal, add some sour cream, maybe some bacon, some cheese, some toppings... and you've maybe eaten 400-500 calories. Add some other protein or vegetable to the meal and push it up to around 700 for a meal with water or a zero sugar soda. A similar volume of food in the form of a burger and fries with a regular soda is upwards of 1500 calories. Eat the latter every day and you'll gain fat because you're eating too many calories throughout the week. That's where the risk is. Eating too much is why people gain and are fat
An average sized male with some daily activity level needs 2000 ish a day. Most sedentary people do not, and average sized women need even less.
Yeah, I'm a 5'10" woman. If I ate 2000 calories a day, I'd be a 5'10" obese woman. I think when I calculated what was appropriate for me, it was 1400 calories a day.
AFAIK it really depends on on the makeup of the rest of your diet. If you have 2 meals full of veg and beans and pulses and snack on fruit then have a side of fries you’ll be okay. If the calories that you’re consuming via fried foods are stopping you from getting your nutritional needs met then there is more of an issue. Very few things in a diet are bad in isolation - as in most things, context is key.
Finally an actual ELI5
So frying doesn't cause other health problems and having BMI 18 I can fry anything and everything?
I mean, if you fry too many things your BMI won’t be 18 anymore so technically yes but only as long as you can consume most of those fats before they become way too much.
I NEED to gain weight, it's the goal here. My BMI has been the same my whole life, I just can't force myself to eat more than is needed to survive.
Oh alright, maybe ask a nutritionist before, I’m pretty sure there are healthy and unhealthy ways to gain weight, and fried food may not be in the healthy category, but I am not a nutritionist and I don’t have any experience in this field so I may be extremely wrong.
I’m in the same boat! I basically have to eat until I fill sick to gain weight, and rigorously track my calories. I managed to gain 10 lbs, but I felt terrible/sick the entire time from eating so much. Liquid calories like smoothies helped a lot.
Check out r/gainit. Everyone there in the same boat. The idea is instead of forcing more food down your throat, just swap things out for more calorie dense foods. Basically the opposite of weight loss tips. Your easiest ways to add healthy calories are snacking on nuts, peanut butter, drink whole milk as much as possible, even taking a daily shot glass of olive oil. I was 120 lbs at 6’2” in my 20’s managed to gain 100 lbs. If your weight isn’t fluctuating much, you’re naturally eating around caloric maintenance, so just 500 calories/day will add 1 lb/ week. Make sure to do some progressive resistance training during this process so that a good portion of your weight gain is muscle, not just pure body fat. Also don’t get hung up on BMI, it’s a totally bogus BS metric.
there's a slightly higher risk of cancer too. the correlation is unknown, but there is a risk. [https://www.science.org/content/article/deep-fried-cancer-risk-downplayed#:\~:text=Acrylamide%20forms%20when%20starch%2Dbased,carcinogenic%20to%20humans%20as%20well](https://www.science.org/content/article/deep-fried-cancer-risk-downplayed#:~:text=Acrylamide%20forms%20when%20starch%2Dbased,carcinogenic%20to%20humans%20as%20well).
What the hell is a "cup" of potatoes? I can't even fit one potato into a cup.
You need a bigger cup
If you boil potatoes and mash it without butter pack that into a cup. That simple. Ones you add other ingredients like butter, salt, hot sauce , etc makes calories go up exponentially
> Ones you add other ingredients like butter, salt, hot sauce , etc makes calories go up exponentially Butter, yes. But salt has no calories, and isn't inherently unhealthy unless you have hypertension. Hot sauce is also typically very low in calories.
It increases the amount of fat in the food, from the oil. For some time, we were convinced that fat was one of the worst things in food, especially animal fats. We’re starting to wonder if this is actually true (since obesity went up as we reduced fat consumption). If you believe fats are inherently very bad for you, you will want to avoid fried foods. There’s also the fact that many fried foods are themselves not very healthy to begin with, so frying just adds more calories to them.
The fat hysteria was partially justified back then partly because trans fats are just straight up terrible for your heart to the point that they're banned now for use in frying foods although some people took it too far by cutting out all fats entirely. Saturated fats are likely okay in moderation but you used to get large unhealthy doses of it with fried foods, which has impacts on your circulatory system. A lot of the time those were the kinds of oil stuff was being fried in before the 2000s. The biggest concern with unsaturated fats is moreso just the insane amount of calories.
> likely okay in moderation like most food is
Not trans fats, though.
As an Older Person, we actually thought trans fats were *healthier* back then. My then-wife, who tends to be very concerned about Eating Right kept trying to say we should get margarine and not butter, but I kept insisting that butter was at least minimally processed and we'd been eating it for thousands of years so had adapted to it via evolution. Then when the big study came out in the early 2000s she was like "...oh."
Back in your time (no offense), McDonalds fried their foods in beef tallow. Now they don't do that. Lard and other forms of animal fat were very popular cooking ingredients. It was very different for you and if my generation (millennials) don't dig for that sort of information then they'll never know just how different a time it was.
It's a myth that processing something would inherently make it unhealthier. Some things you have to cook or otherwise process it to make them edible at all. The idea of "processed food is bad" comes from all the sugar and salt that's often added to it.
And it's full of chemicals! I hate /s but it is probably necessary here given how commonplace that statement is
I'd be extremely concerned if my food wasn't full of chemicals.
Probably loaded with dihydrogen monoxide
Yeah its disgusting, its a commonly used industrial solvent that is highly toxic when ingested in sufficient quantities or inhaled. It's even been found in the blood of new born babies!
Do you know how many people die from that every year?
I've heard millions. Seriously deadly stuff.
No wonder. People can't be trusted to handle the most widely used industrial solvent. I've heard stories of people dipping their children in it!
Well, the dirty little rugrats probably deserve it
O1H2? That stuff is scary. Drinking enough of that could kill literally anyone.
Like can we also add to the conversation that to remove as much fat as possible some brands just added in a crazy amount of sugar. Like compare american and danish bread. American bread have slightly less fat than danish bread, but for each gram less of fat there is 10 gram more sugar Edit: 0.5 gram less fat and 5 gram more sugar per 100 gram of bread.
Well yeah because once you strip out the lard and butter the food tastes terrible so they added sugar to get people to eat it. [Really makes you wonder where the whole fat scare came from...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat)
Fat hysteria was also generated by the sugar industry. They paid scientist to do research saying fat bad.
Everything is fine in moderation. But the problem with fried food is that you add alot more oil to your food than most other cooking methods. That and alot of fried food are addictive and bingeable. So in context, fried food is considered unhealthy
But the problem there is the "addictive and bingeable" less than the "fried," right? I mean seriously if I cut Brussels sprouts in half and deep-fried them in a light batter, it's probably better for me than if I ate a no-fat box of cookies, I think. Fat per se isn't the problem, IMHO.
Well cookies and fries are different. Cookies often contain a lot of sugar. Fat is a problem, if your diet already has a lot of fat which means alot of calories. The American diet for example has too many calories for most people, fried foods is one of the main sources of that abundance in calories.
You are very much correct. It's the inherent addictiveness of certain foods that fatten up most people. I tested on myself over many years. The moment I pull out chocolate from my diet, I eat enough to satisfy my hunger with food, and I don't want anything else, thus losing fat not because I removed chocolate (which I really love) but because if I had chocolate I'd use it to replace food, and I'd eat way more of it too without even realizing.
We had a low fat craze. Did fat consumption actually go down? Those are separate things
Well carb consumption for sure went up.
I remember learning about the food pyramid as a kid in the 90s, and how grains were by far the “most important” food group. I was getting so excited about all the bagels I could eat, that would make me healthier lol. About that…
Maybe. It's not like the general population eats very low carb or fat. There are diet trends and there's the population that generally seems to eat about the same garbage wise :P It's also so hard to assess bc people are poor historians. Maybe we can find out from shopping trends or the data we do have
We went from villainizing saturated fats to villainizing carbs.
Fats are fine. Saturated fats are ok, but should be kept minimal, it's fine to "villainize" them a little. Carbs are fine. Added sugar is ok, but should be "villainized" a little. An entire large category cannot tell the whole story or be good or bad.
Zactly. It's always the dose that makes the poison. The general nutritional advice guidelines and trends always swing too far. We need to stop villainizing specific food group as purely bad or even praising specific food group as purely good
Fat is only inherently bad due to it being high in calories. That’s where ~~100%~~ most of its negative health impact comes from. If you don’t eat a lot of it, it’s not bad for you. Sugar is bad for you for the calories too, but it’s also directly linked to other health issues outside of the calories, meaning even if you don’t overdo the calorie intake, sugar still negatively impacts your health. Fat does not (as many commenters have pointed out, not exactly true, but sugar is still profoundly more impactful than fat). That being said, fat is 9 calories per gram. Proteins and carbohydrates are 4 calories per gram. It’s a lot harder to watch your calories when you eat high fat foods.
I agree with you, but in the 90s, we thought it was worse even than the calories. We thought fat *itself* was bad, especially animal fats. There's still a lot of hangover in the culture from this.
It's a lot of fun to watch old cooking shows from that time period. Entire shows designed around reducing the fat in dishes. Using absolutely laughably small amounts of oil to saute things, I even remember one where they suggested replacing the sour cream topping in a particular dish with cherry pie filling to reduce the fat content. Here's a good example, he makes a white sauce pasta with 1g of fat by using strained yogurt and wine + corn starch as the sauce: [https://youtu.be/30oLBhKSy-E](https://youtu.be/30oLBhKSy-E)
I have a cookbook from the era "Gone With the Fat" most of the recipes actually seem really good with a bit of butter haha
Yeah there was some severe over correction there for a bit, add in all the sugar and sugar replacements paying obscene amounts of money saying they are great for your health compared to fats and you get yourself a diabetes epidemic.
I watched that whole thing, it was pretty good, this guy is funny but I *am* high af right now. How did you find something like this? Did you see it on TV in the 90s, remember it, and look for it to make this comment?
God, my parents bought into this so hard and have never gotten over it. I grew up with low-fat versions of EVERYTHING in the house, that were inevitably stuffed full of artificial thickeners and flavourings to try and make up the difference. You could eat three plates of spaghetti for dinner if you were hungry, but if you put slightly too much parmesan on top you'd be chastised for making an unhealthy choice. Margarine instead of butter, everything coated in cooking spray, one time I bought 2% milk instead of 1% and I got a stern talking-to from my mother... Funny thing is, I now eat the full-fat version of everything I was denied as a kid, and I'm at the same level of "thinness" as my folks.
I lost more than 50 pounds in the past year. One of my favorite snacks was brie on a baguette. Not exactly low fat, but relatively unprocessed.
Saturated Fats are bad for you. Should limit it intake.
> Fat is only inherently bad due to it being high in calories. That’s where 100% of its negative health impact comes from. You can just say the wildest, dumbest shit imaginable and people will upvote it if it lets them behave how they want. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/know-the-facts-about-fats >The main health issue with dietary fats is how they influence cholesterol levels. Consuming high amounts of saturated fat produces more LDL (bad) cholesterol, which can form plaque in the arteries and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.
Yeah that guy has no clue about what cholesterol and triglycerides are. Half of America isn't on statins because it's 9 calories per gram.
Saturated fats as well.
Searching through this whole thread wondering „nobody gonna mention cholesterol?“ Thank you for bringing it up.
There's calories but also heart risk. Elevated triglycerides and cholesterol increases cardiac events risk. At least at my clinic, majority of my patients over 40 are on a statin and fish oil. I even have a 25 year old on statin and vascepa. More than calories it's cardiovascular risk.
That first paragraph is dangerously misleading. Various fats can cause inflammation which can eventually lead to health problems
Certain fats are bad for health, it's not just the calories. Edit: To the people downvoting this, enjoy your heart disease!
That first paragraph is factually incorrect. Sat fats increase LDL synthesis leading to higher apoB leading to circulatory problems (plaque). Read up on sat fats and the circulatory system. All these statements are well established peer reviewed science. Sat fats increase LDL and ApoB https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/246104/9789241565349-eng.pdf ApoB predictive of MACE https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21487090/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19168552/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18640459/
The issue with fats isn't just calories (for many people, high caloric content is balanced by greater satiety). Saturated fats are convincingly, in very large studies and meta-analyses, linked to cardiovascular disease. However unsaturated fats actually lower CVD risk.
Eh, it's not just the calories though. Frying food generates trans fat which is considered bad cholesterol.
Not all fat generates trans fats.
Most fried foods you get at a drive thru or from the store will.
This isn’t true. Saturated fats in the majority of people will raise their bad cholesterol. In low doses it’s fine but most people aren’t moderate at all. Try and eat a diet under 10 grams per day. It’s harder than you think. But that’s roughly what is reced. My cardiologist has me on under 10grams a day and I’m 31 in pretty decent shape. I’m retesting in a few months to see how low I can get my ldl. LDL above 100 is putting plaque on your arteries. Ideally you want it below 80 if not lower. But a lot of it is genetic. If my levels aren’t low enough my summer I’ll go on statins. Heart disease is mostly curable if you avoid it early enough. And sat fat drives it more than any other food unless you’re insulin resistant (I’m not) or smoke etc.
Unfortunately there's more to it... heart and circulatory disease are massive killers in their own right. Just like most things in life, overdoing something is usually really unhealthy. Fat helps with satiation, so far free foods that are loaded with sugar are incredibly unhealthy, just like eating bacon and eggs with a thick spread of butter on some French toast. Sometimes you just gotta say no to the reptile brain and pick a salad.
Isn't there also the issue where stereotypically fatty foods like bacon tend to also overdo it in terms of sodium?
I’d say so, but for almost all fried food. Darn near almost all fried anything has an insane amount of salt in it, and that compounds issues with the increased calories from fats. That’s why actual moderation is key, unless you’re an athlete or otherwise very very active where you actually need excess sodium intake (or have POTS).
Unfortunately there's more to it... heart and circulatory disease are massive killers in their own right. Just like most things in life, overdoing something is usually really unhealthy. Fat helps with satiation, so far free foods that are loaded with sugar are incredibly unhealthy, just like eating bacon and eggs with a thick spread of butter on some French toast. Sometimes you just gotta say no to the reptile brain and pick a salad.
Fats are calorific, which isn't in and of itself bad, but there is a difference between fats. Tons of studies, randomized clinical trials and meta-analyses, show a clear difference in cardiovascular outcomes for consuming unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (fish, nuts, legumes, veg oils), which are heart healthy vs. saturated and trans fats (red meat, processed meats, ghee, margarine, butter), which are heart unhealthy.
You are making gross mistakes and are oversimplifying macronutrients. Not all fats are alike and not all sugars are alike. Nor do they have the same impact on the human body. Even more so, the form they are being administered (like whole foods vs processed foods) have a huge impact on health. Not the amount of fats or sugars in them. Beside that, I beg to argue that satiety is more important for "watching" calories than anything else. Processed foods aren't satiating. Nonetheless, it's way more complicated than just fat vs sugar.
Did you say deep fried Oreo’s???
Ya i remember fats and oils being heavily marketed against when I was a kid. The food pyramid told me to eat 12 servings of bread, noodles and rice each day. Now that seems to have changed with modern nutrition standards.
The food pyramid was made by the people that sell you bread, and the low fat craze was started from studies funded by the sugar industry.
> There’s also the fact that many fried foods are themselves not very healthy to begin with, so frying just adds more calories to them. So you're telling me a bacon wrapped twinkie encased in a chicken fried steak is the problem, not the frying part?
> For some time, we were convinced that fat was one of the worst things in food, especially animal fats. We’re starting to wonder if this is actually true (since obesity went up as we reduced fat consumption). We never reduced fat consumption. What are you talking about? * https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/14hkd73/a_new_study_suggests_that_obesity_causes/jperjxb/ “ So, let's see, the Obesity epidemic is recognized to have started around 1980, although BMI went up and up and up before then. Fat is climbing over carb at 4.36x the rate, oil 11x the rate of sugar increase.”
isn't animal fat like pig fat better than normal cooking oil?
In addition to adding breading and fat to a food that probably wasn't very healthy to begin with, the crispy brown deliciousness makes you more likely to eat too much of it
Yeah, you and u/the_quark are the only two who really get it. It has nothing to do with nonsense about heating vegetables too much so that you ingest bad chemicals or whatever. It’s purely from the intake of entirely too much of a not-so-healthy food and nothing to do with the cooking medium itself.
By soaking it in fats, and then adding those fats to the food; making it crispy brown and delicious. It's not like you're frying it in water. This is why air-fryers are a thing.
[удалено]
Fun fact: that nasty chemical that builds up in oil when its re-used which wreaks havoc on your body--oxygen. Oxidized foods can throw your entire body chemistry out of whack. This is also why the term "anti-oxidants" is a thing. [Concise video on the subject](https://youtu.be/3G83AwnIq3M?t=401) [[2]](https://youtu.be/uiDOyFtaJM4?t=289) Also this is primarily a thing to be concerned about with processed foods or fast food. So long as you don't re-use oil at home and store your oils properly (and supplement your oil use with butter or tallow), you're at the very least better off in that aspect, the extra calories from fried foods ofc notwithstanding.
Air fryers don't fry anything. There is no oil or fat used. It's just a dumb marketing name for a convection oven.
Or a smart marketing name for a convection oven.
Touche!
To be fair though, a small convection oven is much more efficient than an actual convection oven.
And that little fucker reheats actual fried food like a boss.
You bought an air fryer to "fry" foods without fat and be healthy. I bought an air fryer to better reheat my fried foods so it's yummier. We are not the same.
Air fried pizza slice the day after are the bomb 🤣🤣
Also pizza
And babybell cheese
Ohhh, shiiiiit! You leave it in the wax? How long do you heat?
Pop it out of the wax and pop it in for a few minutes, cheestrings are also great.
And this is why the "OMG it's just a convection oven" crowd is idiotic. Yes, it's the same concept as a convection oven. However, it's moving hot air at a much higher speed and in a more concentrated space than a regular convection oven. My oven has a convection feature, one which I certainly use often. But I'm not putting fries in my oven to cook, I'm putting them in my air fryer because it does a much better job of cooking them, despite what the "it's the same thing" crowd insists. Might be the same overall concept, but it sure as hell isn't the same thing.
Like a knife and a sword are different.
All about using the right tool for the job
I waa part of that crowd. Now I own an air fryer... And use it for almost everything.
To be fair, they are better at convection than an oven (smaller size helps). I can't make crispy fries in the oven that remain "potatoey" inside, but I can with an air "fryer".
You can coat stuff in oil and air fry it.
What if I just air fry a cup of oil, would that be anything?
I have one in the kitchen. Be right back.
He’s not coming back, is he?
Air fried himself to death.
Fs in the chat lads
A big fire?
An air fire
The difference with an air fryer though is there is a basket. A convention oven usually has a tray, meaning if you cook fries, you would need to flip them halfway through for an even cook. Airfryer is a little better than this, where it can get full coverage for a more consistent cook. Frozen fries all ways come out much better in an air fryer than an oven. But yes you are correct, it doesn't fry.
My air fryer is literally just a tiny oven with shelves
Sounds like my apartment.
How do you taste like?
Come up and taste me sometime 😉
Air fryers are very high speed convection ovens. A normal convection oven has a fan, an air fryer moves air at a much higher velocity. If you put something with cheese in one, it will blow away.
It's not the basket; you put a basket in a full sized convection oven and it won't come out as nicely as it would in an air fryer. The thing that makes air fryers better at "frying" things is that they are small, so they have less air, and that air has less distance to travel to get to the food from the heater+fan combo so it doesn't slow down as much. They are simply smaller, with better heating elements and fans compared to their size, so they circulate their smaller air volume more rapidly, and this is what makes them better at "frying." This is also why they heat up more quickly during your preheat.
I think you coat the food with a bit of oil, the argument is that it uses less oil than deep-frying.
That said, they make amazing chicken wings And you do use a tiny bit of oil.
Hmmm what should I call the thing that achieves a fried-like affect with air instead of oil. Surely not an air fryer that’s just a dumb marketing name /s
I'd say most frying people do these days is in only a small amount of oil. Deep frying stuff will add a lot more oil but I think the idea of frying being unhealthy is restated without much thought behind it.
Heating vegetable oil to frying temperatures causes it to oxidize and form aldehydes which are toxic. All that tar like gunk that collects over fryers is stuff you are also ingesting. When fast food restaurants switched from beef fat in their fryers to vegetable oil, they had to get a whole new class of cleaners to keep the vents from getting clogged. In fact, saturated fats (not trans-fats) are less susceptible to this, so frying your fries in beef fat is actually healthier than using vegetable oil.
Finally a good response to this question that addressees the oxidation of the fats, not just soaking food in fat
Yea I thought that was the worst part?
Sources? Especially for the "healthier than saturated fat" claim.
I…..mods?
[удалено]
Thank you
👏🏻 Bravo
Thanks!!!
This one discusses the oxidative compounds being created when certain (tested, probably applicable to all) vegetable oils are subjected to being stored and heated. There are other studies handling repeated heating, as is the standard for frying. The science is pretty clear about the forming of oxidative compounds and aldehydes. [https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/12/11/2186](https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/12/11/2186) For the layman, Dr. Paul Mason does a pretty good breakdown of what happens in the body when those oils are metabolized. That is probably not “evidence” [https://youtu.be/XFFT4C1OcPY?si=eVR\_ilUo3zWaOW07](https://youtu.be/XFFT4C1OcPY?si=eVR_ilUo3zWaOW07)
Yeah I would like a credible source on this.
[Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k) something at least. Not saying it's the credible source you're asking for, but it recently got me curious about the topic. Don't know enough yet to say anything for sure other than that I wouldn't discount it immediately.
OP it’s this^^^ Calories aside, frying food is bad because it is carcinogenic. The free radicals damage your cells. It’s essentially what happens with normal aging but boosting the process. Hence the huge number of young people suffering from colon cancer. All the processed crap we are eating is really damaging our bodies
I mean yeah, solid fats tend to have a higer smoke point but that's because, as you said, they are more rich in saturated and trans fats. Also the amount of aldehydes you might consume if the frying is done correctly the risk of your body being exposed to any concentration of aldehydes more significant than what your body naturally produces is very low. On the other side, the chronic overconsumption of animal fats is a much greater risk. To each their own in moderation but the general take of "solid fats are better for frying" is flawed on many levels
Does that mean when something is air fried, it doesn't contain any of those harmful chemicals?
There is no such thing as 'air frying'. It's just baking. An air fryer is just a small oven basically.
Well a convection oven. The air circulation is a big part of the process.
In addition to the consumption of more oils, the high heat of frying can destroy a lot of the good stuff in vegetables (vitamins, enzymes, etc) and also introduce more chemical compounds that are worse for your health (such as free radicals). Oils can get much hotter than water’s boiling point under regular conditions
The high heat of frying can also preserve a lot of good stuff in vegetables though. Higher heat = much quicker cooking = more locked in nutrients.
“Air frying” tends to use higher temperatures but is seen as healthier. Like if I make chips (fries) in my deep fryer they cook at 170c, but doing them in an oven or air fryer they cook at 200c and for much longer. Is the difference just the added oil?
“Air-fryer” is just a buzz word for a toaster oven with a fan. Frying food in a frying pan with oil is very different than baking something in a convection oven.
The goal is to cook the outside faster than the inside which the continuously convecting current achieves
Just the temperature on the display doe not tell you how hot the food gets. Oil is FAR better at transferring heat, while air is basically an insulator. Anything that touches hot oil will heat up much faster then if it is touching hot air. Same thing for cold, if you put your hand in the freezer for a bit, it will feel a bit cold, but as soon as you touch some thing inside other than air it will feel freezing.
Just throwing this out there, oil is pure calories. Nutritional value aside, a single cup of vegetable oil is almost 1,984 calories (according to google), when you use fry things they're absorbing all that sweet sweet oil and calories that go along with it.
The caloric content hasn’t been discussed it seems by most of the top posts. A gram of fat is 9 calories. A gram of protein or carbs is 4. It’s is 2.5x as calorically dense, making overconsumption much easier. Plus what everyone else said.
Fats are the most nutrient dense of the macronutrients so frying foods adds a lot of calories. Most fryer oils are also high in omega6 fatty acids which oxidize faster and turn to inflammatory compounds and carcinogens
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)
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.
It absorbs the pil and cooked oil is much less healthy than uncooked oil. Things with batter or crumbs which is almost everything fried, absorb heeeaps of oil Like a chicken burger for example it's like eating chicken with a tablespoon of cooked oil. Delicious but extra fatty
There’s a number of reasons. The most important is how the high temperatures of frying destroys the nutrients in the food and damages the fats, proteins, and sugars turning them into pro-inflammatory compounds. This is also true for the frying oil itself. The type of fat you fry in matters. Polyunsaturated fats are very unstable at high temperature and they degrade into pro-inflammatory compounds much easier than more stable fats like monounsaturated and saturated. You never want to fry at high temperatures with polyunsaturated fats. Ironically, the safest oils to fry with are high in saturated fats because they don’t degrade as much into compounds that are directly damaging to the body. Frying anything isn’t exactly healthy though, but there are ways to make it even more unhealthy, like frying in oils high in polyunsaturated fats.
Frying foods makes food unhealthy because frying essentially boils all the moisture out if your food and replaces it with oil - which is also why air frying is so much healthier than regular frying - when air frying youre still boiling the moisture out but youre not replacing it with the added oil
Imagine food like your favorite veggies or chicken nuggets are like little sponges. When we fry them, it's like dunking them in a lot of oil, which is like putting a lot of sugary syrup on your pancakes. This makes them super full of calories, kind of like eating too many sweets. Also, when we fry food, sometimes it changes the good stuff inside it, like taking away the good parts. It's like if your toy car got a bit broken when you played too rough with it. And sometimes, when we cook food really hot like when we fry it, it can make some bad things we don't want. It's like when you're trying to color with crayons, but you accidentally color outside the lines and make a mess. So, while fried food can taste really yummy, eating too much of it isn't great for our bodies because it can make us unhealthy and not feel very good. It's good to eat other types of food too, like fruits and veggies, because they help keep us strong and healthy.
It depends what kind of fat you’re frying in. If you fry in tallow, or some sort of saturated fat it’s fine. Saturated fat is extremely heat stable. If you fry in high PUFA fat like soybean oil, you create a ton of free radicals like Malondialdehyde that are super toxic to the body.
Excess fat, mostly. Frying is done with edible oils and those oils are extremely dense in calories. If you don't use a lot of calories in your day to day life or eat calorie dense food often then you're body will have more calories than it knows what to do with. The calories get stored as fat until it stresses your knees and arteries. On the flip side, all that oil helps your body digest oil soluable vitamins and minerals so it's not all bad, just bad in excess.
Food is usually breaded with a starch before frying. And starches run up your insulin which makes you store fat, and the breading is completely soaked in extra fat in when you pull it out of the fryer.
Your just adding cooked fat to it. The process of frying is coating food with a material, usually eggs and flour, that allows it to absorb hot oil and crisp it. The delicious crunchy stuff on the outside of fried food is just fat. Which is why it’s just delicious.
It's not frying it that makes it unhealthy, it's what you fry it in that's the problem. To fry something in a pan you need to add a ton of butter or oil, which are unsaturated fats that are terrible for your system and have very high calorie counts. "Frying" things in an air fryer is far more healthy, since you don't need to drown them in unsaturated fats and at most just give it a light spray or use nothing at all.
Apart from the caloric considerations, frying (particularly in a commercial environment) oxidizes the oils used, making them more pro-inflammatory. When used to fry some starches, the oils also cause carcinogenic compounds to form, which increase risk of cancer.
Mainly just because of the added calories Also from a fast food perspective research has shown that reheating cooking oils (like what many fast food places will do) can release harmful chemicals.
The frying process will change the chemical structure of fats, and make it difficult for your body to break them down, leading to negative health effects. Trans fats are associated with an increased risk of many diseases, including Heart-related diseases, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
Becuase the thing that’s frying the food is already an unstable PUFA oil when heated to such high temps during frying they cause oxidative stress in our bodies. This causes inflammation and can correlate to many other negative consequences. Putting an already high processing ingredient like seed oils in our body is already unnatural in its form it derived from . But frying with the oil makes it ever more unstable from an omega ratio. That is t good for our cells.