I am in Nairobi, so I ask three of my friends to join me for lunch so that we catch up from where we left since I was here five months ago. I ask them if we could do lunch and go for African food, but all of them scream in unison that they needed to binge French fries and cheese burger!

Wow! These girls do not care the least about the dangers of living on French fries from Monday to Monday. I on the other hand am trying to be very careful about what goes down my throat and finally settling into my system.  It is not just in this town that people are chips crazy, even in Kigali people are frites crazy! In every restaurant that you go to in Kigali, the main food to feature is frites.

Fast food is a booming business and is everywhere, at airports, inside malls and even college cafeterias. But what is the real cost of eating all that high fat food? Walking down the streets in Nairobi I could not help taking a look inside the fast foods shops and seeing all the people eating chips without any care was very worrying.

Even though French fries is a common food among the fast foods restaurant and readily available, it is not considered as a healthy food. Any food that’s lowered into a vat of liquid fat is unlikely to be good for the body. While some may argue that using healthier, polyunsaturated cooking oil rather than a saturated fat reduces some of the negative effects; the high temperatures used for deep frying may cause the oil to undergo changes that can lead to free radical formation.

 Deep frying in any kind of oil also increases the calorie and fat content which isn’t positive when it comes to controlling weight. Almost anything that’s deep fried is going to be fat and calorie dense.
Recent research has shown that carbohydrates such as potatoes form acrylamides when heated to high temperatures. Acrylamides have been shown to cause cancer in rats and is believed to do the same in humans. Manufacturers of processed foods are currently working to lower acrylamide levels in common foods such as cookies, breads, potato chips, cereals, and other baked goods – all of which have been shown to contain acrylamides. While you can argue that the acrylamides from a single order of French fry potatoes is unlikely to cause problems; remember how much acrylamide you’re already getting from processed foods. Oven baking fries is not significantly better since it also produces acrylamides.

Although potatoes have some health benefits – they’re a good source of vitamin C, vitamin B6, and potassium – their nutritional value is below those of most green vegetables. Because they’re high glycemic they cause rapid fluctuations in blood sugar and insulin levels which can increase inflammation and, possibly, the risk of weight gain and type 2 diabetes. With so many other healthier vegetables to choose from, French fries shouldn’t be your first choice when it comes to a healthy dish.

Children in big cities are not eating well and approximately 30 percent of them are obese, up more than 50 percent in the past 20 years. In general, children eat too much, and much of what they eat is unhealthy, because walking in the shopping malls and in restaurants- all you will find children eating are French fries or the famous potato crisps.

Am sitting across my friends munching their chips and hamburger away and am digging deep into my fruit salads, which is what I was forced to have as lunch. I cant wait to go back to Kigali for another of my mother’s best dishes of matooke and ground nuts sauce mixed with dry fish. Next time you walk into a fast food restaurant think twice about eating the French fries and the health repercussions thereafter. Have a healthy day!

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