Killer fries?
If you notice fewer science nerds scarfing down your french fries this week, hope they have no friends. Their solitude might slow the spread of new revelations that suggest (but don’t prove) a connection between the highly profitable side and an early death.
The news hasn’t rippled far beyond the scientific community, which was set astir by the findings published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The data, gathered over an eight-year stretch, found that adults who ate fries more than twice a week had double the chances of dying prematurely.
Potatoes were not the villains, according to the report. People who ate baked or mashed taters at the same rate as fries fans showed no greater mortality. And there was a connection between deaths and consumption of fried potatoes in other forms, like tater tots and hash browns.
The study wasn’t an indictment of restaurants, or even fries. Rather, it concluded that people who died young were more likely to eat fries, but did not draw a cause-and-effect connection. Whatever made some participants more likely to die might also have driven them to eat fries, hash browns and tater tots more often.