{"id":47948,"date":"2021-04-24T00:56:49","date_gmt":"2021-04-24T00:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/?p=47948"},"modified":"2021-04-25T17:40:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T17:40:19","slug":"healthy-miracle-convection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/healthy-miracle-convection\/","title":{"rendered":"Air Fryers: The Next Healthy Food Miracle? Or Jumped-Up Convection Oven?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 2017. I\u2019ve arrived at my best friend\u2019s apartment to cat-sit for her over the weekend (I know, I know, find me some situation that\u2019s less<\/em> predictable, right?) I walk into her tiny main room and find an oblong monstrosity taking up roughly 10 percent of her entire kitchen space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is that?\u201d<\/em> I exclaim, bemused.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, it\u2019s my air fryer \u2013 Tay, it\u2019s so good!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

I immediately narrowed my eyes and tried to suss out whether I was willing to trust her instincts when it came to food, but she soon had to leave, and I soon got too distracted by her cat to pay the air fryer any further mind.<\/p>\n

Cut to 2021: nary has a week gone by without hearing some story about air fryers and how they have positively impacted the lives of my friends, colleagues and family. What has happened? Where did this obsession with the kitchen\u2019s newest appliance come from? And \u2013 if my friends are to be believed \u2013 is it really going to change my life?<\/p>\n

What is an Air Fryer?<\/h3>\n

So, an air fryer circulates super-heated air to cook food \u2013 but instead of baking your food like an oven, it mimics a deep fryer<\/a> with no oil (or very little) used in cooking. The essential idea is that in limiting the oil, the unhealthy parts (read: fat, fat and more delicious fat) of fried food are eliminated while you can still enjoy the crispy, delicious goodness of something fried.<\/p>\n

Some people aren\u2019t convinced \u2013 whether it markets itself as a \u201cfryer\u201d, many foodies are simply seeing a slimmed-down version of a convection oven<\/a>. Nonetheless, the air fryer does market itself on the ability to create our favourite deep-fried products (chicken nuggets, battered fish, popcorn shrimp, etc.) without the trans-fats and health risks that come with drenching all these foods in oil while they cook. Sounds great, right?<\/p>\n

Air Fryer: Pros and Cons<\/h3>\n

The problem, from what I can see, is that it feels a lot like kitchen appliance companies trying to hop on the healthy-eating bandwagon too early. Air fryers are a nice novelty and are good for conserving electricity, but they have some obvious drawbacks \u2013 because of their compact nature, often there can only be so much<\/a> food cooked at once. There are also the wildly differing opinions on the taste of the food that an air fryer produces \u2013 from the \u201cit tastes exactly the same!<\/a>\u201d crowd to the \u201chard, brittle, and in desperate need of sauce<\/a>\u201d crowd. There seems to be a level of personal taste involved, but it kind of strikes me the same way vegans try to get me to believe that cashew cheese taste the same on a pizza.<\/p>\n

It just doesn\u2019t<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, there are some legitimate and obvious health benefits<\/a> to using an air fryer \u2013 in comparing similar foods between an air fryer and a deep fryer, you\u2019re getting about 70 percent fewer calories per meal. Research has also suggested that cutting down on deep frying lowers your risk of cancer. However, these too are tempered by suggesting that there are actually some health drawbacks<\/a> to using an air fryer.<\/p>\n

To me, an impartial observer who was initially just kind of wigged out by my friend\u2019s purchase, I\u2019m happy without getting one of these to take up more room in my already-crowded kitchen. My slow cooker is the only essential cooking appliance I need, thank you very much. However, I remain to be proven wrong! How have your experiences with an air fryer been?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are air fryers the answer to healthier eating? Simply Souperlicious’ Tayla Blaire takes a closer look at this latest “healthy eating” craze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":47960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_aioseo_title":"","_aioseo_description":"Are air fryers the answer to healthier eating? Simply Souperlicious' Tayla Blaire takes a closer look at this latest \"healthy eating\" craze.","content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[574,384,395,495],"class_list":["post-47948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soup_and_soul","tag-air-fryer","tag-soup-and-soul","tag-soupsoul","tag-tayla-blaire"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}