The worst kind of fried food for you

We all know that fried food isn’t the best for our waistline or general health. Consistently eating foods like French fries, fried chicken, fish sticks, and tortilla chips puts you at risk for diabetes and heart disease and can even have negative effects on your hormone health.

But are some fried foods worse than others? New research suggests that the answer to this question is “yes.” Not all fried foods are created equal.

The recent study, published in the British Medical Journal, collected data from more than 100,000 women ages 50 to 79. The results showed that eating fried food on a regular basis can be linked to an increased risk of death and heart-related death, which really didn’t come as a huge surprise. Less predictable, however, was that this association was particularly strong for fried chicken and fried fish, including shellfish.

So how much is the risk, exactly? The data collected during the study showed that after accounting for other factors like overall diet quality, income, and activity level, women who ate one or more servings of fried food each day had an eight per cent higher risk of death from any cause. This number jumped to 13 per cent when the woman ate one or more servings of fried chicken each day. In addition, eating fried fish one or more times a day led to a 13 per cent increase in heart-related death.