Are fried foods really completely worthless?
Experts say: Recently, people have frequently asked a rather interesting question: are fried foods really completely worthless?
The first question: Chinese people like to eat fried foods for breakfast, such as youtiao (fried dough sticks), youbing (fried savory pancakes), zhaogao (fried rice cakes), paicha (fried twisted dough), and sanzi (fried twisted dough strips), which is a tradition in many cities. Why do Chinese people like to eat fried things for breakfast? If fried foods have no benefits but only harms, why did our ancestors get used to eating them in the morning?
The second question: If you must eat fried foods, is morning the best choice? Because the work during the day will burn off the calories, and the body's metabolic rate is higher, so eating some fried foods is not very harmful? What are your thoughts on eating fried foods like youtiao for breakfast?
These questions are quite representative. Yes, the love for high-fat food is human nature. Not only Chinese people, but people from all countries love it. Westerners love fried chicken, doughnuts, french fries, and potato chips. Even the Japanese, who have the lightest palate, still like tempura (fried vegetables) and instant fried noodles.
In fact, this situation is not strange at all. Because in the millions of years of human evolution, the biggest fear was starvation, so people are naturally drawn to high-energy foods. High-fat and high-sugar foods are prime examples of high energy, which is why people find them delicious. In fact, taste preference is a genetic adaptation. Unfortunately, times have changed. People's diets are now extremely abundant, and the current wish is to eat without gaining weight, with concerns about diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and colorectal cancer...
However, it is an indisputable fact that fried foods are harmful to health. Whether it's destroying nutrients and antioxidants, increasing fat content, or producing carcinogens, toxic substances, and trans fatty acids, these are all undeniable facts. There are really no nutritional benefits to be found. If one must say there are any benefits, there are two: one is that it makes food crispy and delicious; the other is that it allows the food to absorb fat, increasing its energy content, so it's less filling for the same volume.
The reason high-fat foods did not show obvious harm and were widely liked by the public decades or even hundreds of years ago is due to the following reasons:
1. People in the past had very high levels of physical activity. Even if they ate high-fat foods, they could fully burn and break them down. If you were a construction worker or a porter, eating youtiao would not make you fat, nor would it clog your blood vessels. People had a reason to like fried foods because they are high in fat and energy, which kept them from getting hungry too quickly while working. The problem is, now everyone sits in an office all day. Who still needs high-fat, high-energy foods?
2. In the past, besides occasional fried foods, the dishes in the three meals were very low in oil, and the total fat in the diet did not exceed the standard. Now, even non-fried dishes contain a lot of oil, plus high-fat biscuits, pastries, cold drinks, and various flour-based products, as well as large amounts of meat, making the total fat intake for the day excessive. Eating fried foods on top of that is extremely dangerous.
3. In times of poverty, people ate large amounts of coarse grains, beans, potatoes, and vegetables. These are all ingredients that help prevent chronic diseases. Even if they ate some fried foods, combined with so many healthy factors, some of the negative effects could be mitigated. Now, people eat very few of these high-fiber, high-antioxidant foods. If they are also enthusiastic about fried foods and other high-fat foods, how can it not be dangerous?
4. In the past, people's life expectancy was shorter. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the average life expectancy was less than 40 years, and 30 years ago it was only about 60. It was hard to consider chronic diseases in later life. Now, we want to live to be over 80, so we have to be more cautious.
In summary, unless you are engaged in heavy manual labor, eating fried foods really has no benefits. If you must eat fried foods for the sake of taste, the only suggestion is to eat more vegetables, fruits, coarse grains, and beans for the other two meals, and use as little oil as possible when cooking. People might think that eating them in the morning is better than at night, because there is still work in the morning to burn calories, whereas at night it's just watching TV and sleeping. But after all, the work in the morning is also in the office, so the calorie burn is very limited and cannot be a sufficient reason to say that eating fried foods is harmless. Besides, the various harmful and carcinogenic substances in them cannot be fully metabolized just because it's morning... In short, indulging your taste for these things is best done occasionally.