I love pickles, but deep-fried ones can kill your heart. Here’s why

It takes a lot to surprise me on the topic of nutrition, but while on a recent trip to Arizona, you could color me shocked.

On the menu was a basket of cut-up fried pickles, containing an incredible 880 calories. When you grow up in your father‘s delicatessen, eating pickles is part of life. I would pick them right out of the barrel. As a child I never thought about calories or sodium. I just enjoyed the crunch and tangy taste.

One whole dill pickle contains about 5 calories and 260 mg of sodium. The most plentiful vitamin in the pickle is vitamin K. I would guess, by visual observation, that the basket contained the equivalent of eight large dill pickles.

So this would be 40 calories derived from the pickles. That means 840 calories in that basket was from breading and absorbed oil. If dill pickles are naturally fermented, they contain probiotics.

But almost all commercially prepared pickles are prepared in a vinegar and sodium brine, which is where they pick up their impressive sodium content. So it’s hard to come up with any nutritional benefit in these deep-fried pickles.

This tale of pickles illustrates what deep frying does to food. There is more to it than just the tremendous boost in calories. When some fried foods are cooked at very high temperatures, trans fats can be formed. Trans fats increase risk for heart disease and cancer.

Many restaurants reuse the oil for frying. Each time an oil is reused for frying, its trans fat content increases, a study in the journal Food Chemistry found. Everything I’m describing here is about deep fried foods, not unbreaded food that is sautéed in a pan.

I’m not an all or nothing dietitian. Occasional fried food will not send one into the cardiac unit.

But a steady diet of deep fried food is not a friend to your heart and arteries.

Sheah Rarback MS, RDN is a registered dietitian nutritionist in private practice in Miami, FL srarback@gmail.com