Without a doubt, fast-food french fries pose the worst danger to your weight and health. Nearly everyone loves them—even people who aren’t fast-food junkies. Yet french fries are often soaked with trans fats, chemically altered oils that are an even greater risk for heart disease than saturated fats like butter and lard. French fries are also high in acrylamide, a chemical that forms in starchy foods like potatoes when they’re cooked in very hot fat and is known to cause cancer in laboratory animals. And we haven’t even talked about the excessive salt sprinkled on them.
What should you do? No one wants the food police ordering them to hand over their fries. But you don’t want to keel over from a stroke or heart attack either, do you? So try this for compromise. If you have an irresistible craving for fries, order the small size and eat them s-l-o-w-l-y. Like one at a time. Enjoy every bite . . . and leave a few for a friend. Feeling better? Good. Because, in all honesty, you’ve reached your fry limit. This is one fast food you can’t have every week if you want to lose weight—or keep your blood fats in the healthy zone. Besides the deadly trans fats and cancer-causing acrylamide, french fries are loaded with calories. A typical small order packs between 200 and 300 of them. You’d have to walk between two and three miles to burn them off—and even then your arteries would still be stuck with the extra-fatty load.
