Is french fries harmful and what exactly
Delicious crispy fried potato strips let you fill up while still enjoying your meal. Why don’t many people recommend this dish and are french fries so bad for health? It turns out that the answer is not so straightforward. It all depends on how the potatoes are prepared and cooked. The vegetable itself contains many useful elements that are important to preserve during the frying process, having received a completely dietary product.
To prepare this dish, a certain kind of potato is taken and fried in a large amount of oil. Such food has a number of disadvantages that determine whether potatoes are harmful to humans:
- in tubers there is an excess of carbohydrates with a minimum amount of coarse fibers that ensure their assimilation. Excessive consumption of potatoes leads to weight gain and negatively affects the functioning of the stomach;
- vegetables used in food establishments may not correspond to the quality required by technology and may contain nitrates poisoning the human body;
- in a cafe, when frying, a deep fryer is used, in which the oil changes quite rarely. Trans fats arising from prolonged boiling cause the formation of blood clots, have a bad effect on the functioning of the kidneys and liver;
- to reduce the cost of the dish and get more profit, fast food enterprises use a mixture of palm, coconut and other oils for frying. The answer to the question of whether potatoes fried in this oil are harmful is obvious. When heated and used repeatedly, such a mixture is a source of carcinogens that can cause various diseases, even cancer.
Perhaps a rare visit to fast food outlets and the consumption of french fries will not immediately cause health problems. But is it worth the risk?
There are many recipes to minimize the negative impact of the product. Their main idea is to prepare food without using oil and frying process. You can get potatoes with a golden brown crust and without harmful components by dipping the sliced tuber into whites whipped with salt and baking them in the oven. Such a self-prepared dish can be conditionally dietary, since the question of whether potatoes with their high calorie content are harmful, still remains.
Sometimes you want to indulge yourself in crispy potato pieces. Only this should be done consciously and with a sense of proportion, and it is better to prefer the food of a controversial quality to the one that is prepared at home.