page_title: French fries
section_title: Health aspects
hierarchical_section_title: French fries / Health aspects
caption_attribution_description: Fries or chips cooking in oil in a chip-pan. Photograph available under GFDL license. I took this picture myself in 2000, with an OM-2 Olympus camera. The picture was digitally edited. You do not need my permission to reuse it, but you may not claim that you took the photo yourself.
context_page_description: French fries, or simply fries, chips, finger chips, or French-fried potatoes, are batonnet or allumette-cut deep-fried potatoes.
  French fries are served hot, either soft or crispy, and are generally eaten as part of lunch or dinner or by themselves as a snack, and they commonly appear on the menus of diners, fast food restaurants, pubs, and bars. They are usually salted and, depending on the country, may be served with ketchup, vinegar, mayonnaise, tomato sauce, or other local specialties. Fries can be topped more heavily, as in the dishes of poutine or chili cheese fries. Chips can be made from Sweet potato instead of potatoes. A baked variant, oven chips, uses less oil or no oil.
context_section_description: French fries primarily contain carbohydrates (mostly in the form of starch) and protein from the potato, and fat absorbed during the deep-frying process. Salt, which contains sodium, is almost always applied as a surface seasoning. For example, a large serving of french fries at McDonald's in the United States is 154 grams. The 510 calories come from 66 g of carbohydrates, 24 g of fat, 7 g of protein and 350 mg of sodium.
  Experts have criticized french fries for being very unhealthy. According to Jonathan Bonnet, MD, in a TIME magazine article, "fries are nutritionally unrecognizable from a spud" because they "involve frying, salting, and removing one of the healthiest parts of the potato: the skin, where many of the nutrients and fiber are found." Kristin Kirkpatrick, RD, calls french fries "...an extremely starchy vegetable dipped in a fryer that then loads on the unhealthy fat, and what you have left is a food that has no nutritional redeeming value in it at all." David Katz, MD states that "French fries are often the super-fatty side dish to a burger—and both are often used as vehicles for things like sugar-laced ketchup and fatty mayo."
  Frying french fries in beef tallow, lard, or other animal fats adds saturated fat to the diet. Replacing animal fats with tropical vegetable oils, such as palm oil, simply substitutes one saturated fat for another. For many years partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were used as a means of avoiding cholesterol and reducing saturated fatty acid content, but in time the trans fat content of these oils was perceived as contributing to cardiovascular disease. Starting in 2008, many restaurant chains and manufacturers of pre-cooked frozen french fries for home reheating phased out trans fat containing vegetable oils.
  French fries contain some of the highest levels of acrylamides of any foodstuff, and experts have raised concerns about the effects of acrylamides on human health. According to the American Cancer Society, it is not clear as of 2013 whether acrylamide consumption affects people's risk of getting cancer. A meta-analysis indicated that dietary acrylamide is not related to the risk of most common cancers, but could not exclude a modest association for kidney, endometrial or  ovarian cancers. A lower-fat method for producing a French fry-like product is to coat "Frenched" or wedge potatoes in oil and spices/flavoring before baking them. The temperature will be lower compared to deep frying, and which also reduces acrylamide formation.
caption: Fries frying in oil
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