Is Fried Food Healthy?

When someone asks "Is fried food healthy?" the answer seems pretty obvious, right? It's a resounding no. No, fried food is not healthy. Fried food is incredibly unhealthy.

However, there can be health benefits to fried food under very specific conditions. But none of this outweighs the fact that eating fried food is not healthy on the whole under most if not all circumstances. So, is fried food healthy? No. Why? Well...

What We Do When We Fry

To understand why eating fried food is awful for your body, we must understand what frying even is. To fry something, you submerge your food in heated oils. Maybe a little bit. Maybe a lot. While the more oil will release that intense, greasy flavor that many people crave, more oil will also soak your food in straight-up fat, increasing the calories to ridiculous levels.

Now, this is where you can choose healthier options (not healthy, but healthier). Depending on the oils you use, your food may be less unhealthy. Certain oils, like canola oil, offer less of a negative impact on your health than other oils full of trans-fats. Trans-fats can lead to clogged arteries, which, in turn, leads to heart disease.

Look, I'm gonna be honest. Fried foods are not healthy. They simply aren't. But all that grease isn't the only problem with them.

All Them Calories, and Nothing Else

Because you're essentially drowning your food in pure fat, you can expect all that fried food to be overloaded with calories. The body stores excess calories as body fat, and, rest assured, that food isn't going anywhere if you're eating a lot of greasy, fried food.

Now, storing calories is not inherently bad for you. The body does this naturally for a reason. The problem is your unhealthy diet of food is doing nothing good to your body. When your body eats, your body absorbs nutrients. With fried food, all the good nutrients in the fried food is replaced by fat. The more fried, the worse it gets.

This leads to your body getting too many calories, but too little nutrition. You starve yourself with food.

But What About – ?

No, I'm gonna shut you up there. You're wrong.

I know every few weeks there's a new "study" done to prove that maybe eating fried food isn't so bad for you, and this article gets spread all over the place, but they're wrong.

Or, at least, criminally misleading.

All food has some sort of health benefit (in general) in that, if you have it, at least you aren't dying. So any food related story can be spun a certain way. "Hey, eating french fries drowned in oils will keep you from dying of starvation." Yeah, but so will drinking straight protein drinks or a diet of salad. So will a lot of things.

And yes, vegetable oils are coming from vegetables, but you wouldn't drink olive oil, would you? That's incredibly unhealthy. Veggie oil has no nutritional value to the body. It's just calories.

You can spin it any way you want, but you will never get a different answer if you ask "Is fried food healthy?" No. It's no.

Stop asking stupid questions.