Fried Food Doesn't Cause Heart Attacks

Good news grease lovers: Fry your food right, and you might not die of a heart attack after all. A new study in the British Medical Journal has upended conventional wisdom by finding no correlation between how often participants ate fried foods and how likely they were to develop heart disease. The catch? The study was conducted in Spain, where foods are usually fried in olive oil or sunflower oil—and where people generally eat more healthily overall, the Telegraph reports.

The study looked at 40,000 people, and observed 606 incidents of heart disease spread evenly among fried food addicts and those who avoided them. Two other recent studies elsewhere have yielded similar results, according to a professor commenting in the Journal. "Taken together, the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart is not supported by available evidence," he wrote. But don't reach for the French fries yet: Fried foods still tend to have more calories, and may cause high blood pressure. (More fried food stories.)