The Best (and Worst) Fast-Food French Fries

Worrying about calories seems silly after you've consented to a French fry grease-fest, but sometimes you can't help it. During one such conflicted experience, I wondered if some fast-food fries were less hard on the body than others. Looking at the nutritional facts of some common French fry purveyors, I found that you can, indeed, save some serious calories if you know which fries to buy.

I looked at these seven:
-Arby's Curly Fries
-Burger King's French Fries
-Carl's Jr.'s Natural-Cut Fries
-Dairy Queen's French Fries
-Jack in the Box's Natural Cut Fries
-McDonald's French Fries
-Wendy's French Fries

Notes: The numbers below are estimated reports by each restaurant's official website at the time of this article.

Calorie-wise:

The Best
Dairy Queen wins with 2.69 calories/gram
Jack in the Box is close behind with 2.71 calories/gram

The Worst
McDonald's it is, with 3.25 calories/gram

Those stats may sound like just a few calories' difference, but that's a 21% difference, which adds up since a large serving tends to be around 190 grams.


But there are other stats to look at...

Here's the zero trans fat team:
Burger King
Carl's Jr.
Dairy Queen
McDonald's
Wendy's

This one is the trans fattiest:
Jack in the Box


How about saturated fat?

The Best
Dairy Queen (0.018g saturated fat/gram of fries)

The Worst
Arby's (0.037g saturated fat/gram of fries)


Also remember that a good deal in dollars, doesn't translate to your diet, and a "large fries" means something different to everyone:

Large Fries Serving Sizes
McDonald's: 154g
Carl's Jr.: 184g
Wendy's: 184g
Dairy Queen: 186g
Arby's: 190g
Burger King: 194g
Jack in the Box: 236g


Sources: Yahoo! Food

Aerobic, Resistance Best Exercises For Elderly

Older, obese adults who do a combination of aerobic and resistance exercises have less insulin resistance -- a warning sign of type 2 diabetes -- and are better able to do simple tasks, researchers said on Monday.

The findings might be useful to help motivate elderly people, who often fear that exercise is bad for them, another expert said.

A team led by Lance Davidson of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and Columbia University in New York, studied 136 sedentary older adults with abdominal obesity, a build-up of fat around the waist that raises the risk of heart disease and other problems.

They were placed in one of four groups: A group that did resistance exercise three times a week, one that walked on a treadmill three times a week, one that did both types of exercise and one that did neither.

After six months, researchers found older adults who had done combined resistance and aerobic exercise had lower levels of insulin resistance, an age-related condition that often precedes diabetes, stroke and heart disease.

Participants in all of the exercise groups were better able to do simple tasks like standing up from a chair or walking in place, Davidson and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine. But here too, the group that did a combination of exercises fared best.

Dr. William Hall, director of the Center for Healthy Aging at Highland Hospital in Rochester, New York, said bias against older people may be keeping some seniors from exercise.

"You have to show seniors that they will feel better and do better -- that becomes an incredible motivator," he said.