Ask a Dietitian: Is Eating Fries Everyday Unhealthy?

Hi Charlotte, if I eat fries every day for lunch will this have any negative health effects if the rest of my diet is healthy and I’m young and only planning to eat like this for a year maximum?

This is such an ‘it depends’ question but I’ll try my best; be warned I’m going to chuck a few questions back for you to think about.

Nutrition can end up being complicated because most of the negative health effects we see take years, if not decades, to appear by which point the damage has been done. This makes it tricky to study nutrition and also tricky for people to follow advice. Humans are really bad at accurately assessing long-term consequences, if people don’t see immediate results it can be so easy to fall off the wagon and give up.

Also, people are different, what affects one person a lot might not affect another at all. Smoking is a good example of this because not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer, it depends on a lot of factors, some within our control and some not. What I’m talking about here is risk.

Smoking increases your risk of lung cancer, but it doesn’t mean you’re definitely going to get lung cancer. Similarly, eating fries everyday will increase your risk of experiencing negative health effects (not as much as smoking mind you), but doesn’t guarantee you will experience any negative consequences.

Another problem – yes, there are more problems – with nutrition is we don’t eat in isolation. What I mean by that is you’re eating fries… but what could you be eating instead? How is this affecting your appetite later on? How does this affect your mental health and energy levels and how does this further impact your diet? If you have any medical conditions with dietary recommendations or restrictions - how would this choice impact your health? I know you know that eating fries every day isn’t a good idea; otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me this question.

So my question to you is why are you planning to eat fries for lunch everyday for a year? Is it for convenience? If so, then there are plenty of healthier convenient foods – *cough cough* Huel – to fill that gap. If you’re just asking the question out of interest then I’m afraid I can’t give you a straight answer.

To summarize and answer your question directly: I have no idea. You may not notice any negative effects at all, but I wouldn’t advise trying to find out.