Is a person able to survive being deep fried without death?

This question is a little more morbid than the previous questions I’ve answered- but I think we’ll be okay as long as we don’t do any testing!

When you deep fry anything, your oil temperature should be between 350-375 degrees Fahrenheit (about 180 degrees Celsius). Much hotter and the batter won’t cook before the internal food does. If the oil is too cold the food will get way too greasy before the batter turns that crisp, tempting brown.

I know this from experience. Whenever my family fries potatoes for dinner, my dad sticks a thermometer into the pot after each batch to make sure we’re retaining the temperature. If my boyfriend is with us, it’s usually his job to deal with the pot of sizzling oil. I have yet to determine if this is a power move made by my dad or a show of bravery from my boyfriend. Each time he takes out a batch of french fries or sliced potatoes, we wait to let the oil reheat to right around 360 degrees so that the heat transfers properly into the potatoes. For the purposes of this question, we’ll say the oil is 360 degrees.

On the website “Cooking for Engineers,” Burr Zimmerman has written a fantastic article about heat transfer properties for different cooking methods. If you look at Table 1 in the article, you’ll see that oil has a pretty average heat capacity. This means that its temperature will change at fairly average rates as you add heat. You’ll also notice that it has a thermal conductivity that is much higher than that of water. This means that it will conduct heat much more quickly than water- and is why a deep-fried chicken nugget will cook much faster than if it were boiled. Most recipes call for food to be deep-fried for four minutes, so we’ll use that as our time for the body to be submerged.

But we’re not talking about chicken nuggets- we’re talking about a human. There are a few fatal risks involved if you were to stick a human body into a deep fryer:

1. Burning
2. Dehydration
3. Shock
4. Blood Loss

We’ll explore these three areas below, and whether or not they would cause death in this specific scenario.

1. Burning

This is likely the first thing that would affect someone placed in a vat of hot oil. There’s actually a great article about how the body would react to a deep fryer. Because of the way burns kill cells, they call burning “amputation by fire.” Yikes!

A body submerged in a deep fryer would almost instantaneously be covered in third degree burns. It would be horrendously painful, and the dermis, epidermis, and hypodermis (three layers of skin from outside in) would be burned through to the muscle very quickly. These burns kill cells completely: and eventually, they would make it to your major organs and kill those cells too. If a piece of chicken breast is cooked fully in four minutes on a deep fryer, the body would experience similar sensations over the entire surface area. Even at a thickness half that of a chicken breast, you would experience severe burning of all skin, as well as many major organs. (Not to mention that your internal body temperature would rise very quickly, as blood transferred heat from closer to your skin inside your body. This heatstroke would damage your brain, kidney, etc. This rise in temperature would certainly be fatal.)

These burns would damage your organs, blood vessels, and kill your nerve endings. (BTW nerve endings in your central nervous system don’t regrow, so this would be super bad. But don’t worry- your peripheral nervous system could regenerate if you were burned for a short time.)

The question-asker brings up a potential solution, though: what happens if you cool the body down beforehand? The human body could cool to about 70 degrees Farenheit (21 degrees Celsius) before the person is in fatal condition. Because oil transfers heat SO well (See Burr Zimmerman Article above), this temperature would not trap enough moisture in the body to protect from heat. (This person would also be VERY close to severe hypothermia, and that’s not optimal. Then again, none of this is really optimal.)

The freezing process traps moisture- so if you were to freeze the batter, it would take longer to crisp, and would give the person frostbite just before they were burned. (Ouch.) As the batter was fried heat would still get transferred to the person beneath- this would only slow the process and cause more heat damage beneath, as it would take a very long time for the water trapped in the frozen batter to evaporate. As the batter fries, it will dehydrate, allowing oil through. Which brings us to our next point…

2. Dehydration

Have you ever dropped fries into oil to be deep fried? If so, have you noticed the bubbles that rise to the top?

These bubbles are produced by the water that is being removed from the food. The oil is at a temperature FAR above the boiling point of water, so any water that is in the food gets turned to steam faster than you could say “Ow!”

We’ll have to talk about burning on a cellular level in order to discuss dehydration. (I know, we’re jumping back a step for a second.) I recently found an AMAZING website and Youtube channel called It’s Okay To Be Smart that writes about the effects of a burn on a cellular level– I’ll paraphrase one of their articles here and apply it to what we’re talking about.

You know how fats, like bacon grease, will harden when room temperature but will melt and lose shape as they heat up? Your cell membranes do the same thing. Cell membranes are made up of two layers of phospholipids (A fancy word for molecules with hydrophobic heads). Phospholipids and fats are both types of lipids, and act very similarly. So as your cells heat up, they begin to lose shape.

Proteins in your cells will also begin to unravel as the cell heats. This is important because proteins direct all of the functions of your cells- they tell your kidney cells to be kidney cells, your skin cells to be skin cells, and they control actions like osmosis (water flow in and out of the cell) and respiration. If these proteins unravel, they will no longer be able to direct your cell functions. These cell functions include the process by which proteins are formed, protein synthesis, and thus you have a cell full of messy, unraveled proteins and no way to produce new ones.

Finally, the water in your cells will evaporate away. Those cell membranes are not going to be functioning anymore, and the water between and inside your cells will be able to turn to steam and float away.

“But Anna,” you say, “There’s a batter coating! Wouldn’t this protect your skin since the oil isn’t directly touching you?”

“Ah,” I would say, “But it does touch you!” That beautiful, mild brown color that you see on chicken tenders and French fries is a result of dehydration. As the molecules dehydrate, they shrink down, allowing for oil molecules to pass through the batter and up into the meat that you’re cooking. This is why chicken tenders are juicy, even if most of their original moisture is evaporated due to the high heat of the oil. So the oil does touch you directly, and it can transfer its heat directly to your body.

If you want to know more about that process, I would recommend watching the video below, describing the Chemistry of fried foods.

So let’s talk about the big picture. A person loses about half a gallon of water each day. This is why doctors recommend that you drink about half a gallon of water each day- you’re replacing the water you lose. Since a person can survive for three or four days without water, we’ll conservatively say that a person could lose about 2 gallons of water before they perished from dehydration.

I used the Q&A page at the Department of Physics in Illinois to find this formula that I could use to calculate the amount of water lost:

(mass loss rate)/(unit area) = (vapor pressure – ambient partial pressure) * sqrt ( (molecular weight)/(2*pi*R*T))

R = gas constant (8.314 J/mol degrees K)

Molecular Weight of H2O= 18.01528 g/mol

Unit Area= 1.75 m^2 (Average surface area of a human)

T= 455.372 degrees K

Ambient Partial Pressure = 5,516 Pascals (assumed partial pressure of water in the air)

Vapor Pressure= 1,002,800 Pa (hot dang)

P.S. I found the vapor pressure of water at different temperatures in a chart (thank goodness…)

This doesn’t take into account that the water is also in oil and interacting with those molecules- but cut me some slack, I’m an English major!

The number that results from this equation is outrageously large because the vapor pressure of water at this temperature is outrageously large. Most things that are fried need about 4 minutes to be thoroughly fried without being overcooked. That being said, this equation and the conversion into gallons resulted in far, FAR more than two gallons being lost in four minutes. A person couldn’t survive a dehydration this severe.

Shock

It’s likely that as you’re putting the person in the oil, they would begin to go into neurogenic shock- the kind of shock that happens as a result of severe emotional disturbance. (Honey, if you were coated in batter and then put in a deep fryer, you would be severely emotionally disturbed.)

Shock occurs when low blood pressure too low for your blood to properly transfer oxygen, as it is not pumping at a normal rate through the body. It is usually fatal if untreated, because oxygen cannot get to your brain and your cells are not able to perform usual respiratory functions.  This is about all I have on this topic- you simply wouldn’t have oxygen for cell respiration, so your essential organs wouldn’t have the oxygen needed to function.

Blood Loss

You definitely wouldn’t die of blood loss, because your wounds would be cauterized.

Think about cooking an egg: the proteins in the egg harden as heat is applied, right? The same thing would happen to your wounds. The proteins in your blood and skin would harden when exposed to extreme heat. The proteins would clump together due to a process called communal aggregation. These proteins are all hydrophobic (hint: this means they hate water) and thus would prevent fluid, like blood, from passing through.

But the problem here lies in infection. Cauterization of wounds leaves LOTS of room for infection. Lots and lots. Your dermis, your top layer of skin, if your first line of defense against pathogens (a disease-causing virus or bacteria). Your other two dermal layers are- you guessed it- your next two layers of defense. If these are damaged, pathogens are more easily able to get into your body and affect things like muscle tissue.

Conclusion

No, this person would definitely not survive. Even if this person survived the original burning, they would be so dehydrated that they would not survive the heat- and would likely experience fatal shock or die of infection in the aftermath.

Have a science-related question? Find a question on Yahoo Answers that you want me to answer? Contact me at thechemicalsadvocate@gmail.com!

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