Eating French Fries Can Be as Dangerous as Smoking Cigarettes — and One Key Ingredient Is to Blame

As a teen secretly sneaks out of his home to hang out with his gang of chain-smokers, the cigarette pack sitting in the roadside shop weeps for being demonized as a forbidden entity. On the flip side, appetizers like burgers, pizzas, and fries are still normalized as part of happy meals. Nobody has to lie or hide if they desire to eat a bowl of crispy fries. One health expert, named Craig McCloskey (@craig_mccloskey), revealed that the smile of these greasy fries is much more devious than the crocodile tears of a cigarette.

McCloskey is a Master Certified Health Coach (MCHC) from The Institute of Transformational Nutrition. He is a celebrated internet personality who promotes notion-shattering ideas like non-toxic living can be cheaper, ice-cream can be healthier, focus on health, not weight or calories, and mayonnaise can be healthier than seed oils. In this video, he shared the insight that “eating a 5-ounce serving of fries fried in seed oils creates as many cancer-causing compounds that you’ll get by smoking 25 cigarettes.”

The health coach writes on his website that his family’s health is one of the greatest inspirations of his work. In a comment, McCloskey revealed that each of his grandparents smoked two packs of cigarettes per day, which is about 40 cigarettes. He lived with them until he was twelve. This, probably, became an inspiration for him to share this lesser-known idea and debunk the myth that fries could be healthier than cigarettes. Typical French fries, he said, contain “aldehydes,” the same compound that people can get cancer from when they smoke.

“The most well-known one is called ‘formaldehyde.’ This is a group-1 carcinogen known to cause cancer,” McCloskey explained, giving reference to the World Health Organization (WHO). Aldehydes, he said, “are so problematic. They lead to a host of health issues.” He said, “There’s a 2019 study that found that just a five-ounce, a little serving of French fries from a major fast food chain fried in vegetable oils contains 25 times more of these dangerous aldehydes than the World Health Organization’s tolerable upper limit for exposure. This amount of toxins was the equivalent of smoking 2o to 25 cigarettes.”

“This is not to make you fear seed oils. This is not to scare you. This is just to make you aware that eating seed oils over a span of time can lead to health issues,” McCloskey said, concluding the video. In the caption, he elaborated on how the toxins and rancid fats one ingests and digests from the fries can accumulate in the tissues for long periods, sometimes months or years, which can harm the body to an unthinkable extent.

The video left viewers shocked, especially the fast food fans. @penchitu exclaimed, “We are cooked!” @cortney.l.sayre commented, “Yikes, that’s alarming!” @chrisomack declared, “I’m done with fries!” @itsdaverobinson, a holistic health coach, commented, “That’s insane! We need to make seed oils illegal!” In response, McCloskey reflected that, “It’s pretty hard when our congress and dietary guidelines committee is receiving funding from seed oil manufacturers and big food that uses seed oils.”

You can follow Craig McCloskey (@craig_mccloskey) on Instagram for mind-bending health videos.