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 open.spotify.com/episode/6wQ6Xf…
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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Dr Peter Attia: “…I have posed this question to every friend of mine who is more steeped in nutrition than I am & I still don’t have a great sense of how to explain these results”
The MCE is one of the most egregious examples of data suppression and cherrypicking in modern medicine.
The data “confusing” because they fly in the face of the “heart healthy” omega-6 fats narrative, taken objectively the results are clear as day.
The gold standard for scientific research is a “Randomized Control Trial”, in which treatment and control groups are randomly assigned, and the intervention, be it diet or drugs is tightly controlled.
You've likely heard of "The French Paradox": the French consume primarily butter and have elevated cholesterol, yet low incidences of cardiovascular disease.
Are there any wealthy nations that consume large amounts of seed oils and few sat. fats? How are they fairing?
“Israelis eat less animal fat and cholesterol and fewer calories than Americans, but they have comparable rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and many cancers. They have an ideal diet, as far as the American food pyramid is concerned, but far from ideal… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
2/ Why All the seed oils?
Israeli’s are on the Mediterranean, but do not adhere to its famed diet of fish and olive oil.
Being a relatively new nation like the US, Israel lacks the deep culinary traditions of its neighbors.
When Ray Crock purchased the franchise rights to Mcdonalds in 1961, he was really purchasing the hallowed beef tallow french fry that had diners hooked.
Sold in a single 2.4oz size, the original McDonald’s french fry was a perfect American creation, universally beloved.
Top quality 8oz idaho Russet potatoes, peeled then soaked in cold water, and fried in Mcdonald’s proprietary tallow mix.
At the original Mcdonald’s location in San Bernadino, these were the stand out item, the fries were made in a dedicated fryer with military precision.
For years these fries were an American treasure, then fear of high cholesterol reared its ugly head.
A lone zealot with deep pockets named Phil Sokolov had a heart attack and directed his personal fortune towards the complete removal of saturated fat from the American diet.
We are often asked what a “seed oil” is exactly. It’s all there in the name. If you are extracting oil from a seed, a number of things are going wrong:
Corn kernels are seeds, rice bran is a seed, all nuts are seeds. Coconut, palm, olive and avocado are fruits.
Fruits can be cold extracted, seeds generally require industrial processing and high heat, which leads to nasty byproducts.
Even cold pressed & unrefined seed oils are unnaturally high in PUFA and known to cause metabolic issues.
They are preferable to refined seed oils as they retain their antioxidants and micronutrients, but should still be strictly limited or avoided.
“Seed oil free” is by no means boring. Miami Catalan hot spot Niu Kitchen was incredibly accommodating and knowledgeable about their oil usage, only a spare one or two dishes used a seed-oil based aioli.