The dangers of deep fryers, a deep dive into dirty oil 🤿
Deep fried food is wrecking your health, thread on strategies to lessen the damage or avoid them all together 🧵
Fried foods are a staple of American casual restaurants, and when done right they are delicious and addicting.
Convenience and cost led kitchens to move from solid, stable and saturated fats like beef tallow and lard to polyunsaturated seed oils, that cant take the heat 🔥
Seed oils are PUFAs, they have fewer double bonds along their carbon chain, and are highly sensitive to heat. They spit out trans fats, oxidized lipids and other nasty free radicals in a process called “Nonenzymatic browning”.
This is what drives the darkening of the oil 🛢️
Deep frying of PUFA’s emits polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and aldehydes, which are significant contributors to DNA mutation and cancer formation.
Even fumes from these fryers have been proven dangerous.
There are no firm regulations around how often restaurants must change out their cooking oils, and thus no regulation on the load of carcinogens in your chicken nuggets
Your best bet is to avoid deep fried foods altogether, but if you’re craving something crispy, do your best to find restaurants that fry in saturated fats that are changed as often as possible.
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2017 deep dive on the cause and fallout of Mcdonald’s transition from beef tallow to vegetable oil is a great listen, culminating in a blind taste test of the reformulated tallow classic
Seed Oil Scout has beef tallow fries, coconut oil donuts and more mapped out across the country, helping Americans everywhere #StopEatingPoison 🇺🇸
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