YOUR WORLD AT A GLANCE

“Right now it looks pretty good for her,” Kayser said in an interview on Thursday. “She’s not riding as high as she was in the past, but these look like pretty respectable numbers.” 79 years, over an eight-year period. Researchers used questionnaires to determine each person’s spud-eating habits, including both fried and unfried products, and then used the data to trace links between potato consumption and mortality.

“No study existed about this possible association!” emailed Nicola Veronese, a scientist with the National Research Council in Padova, Italy. Veronese was the lead author and one of a dozen researchers who took part in the study. “There were some studies, re: potato consumption and cardiovascular disease and mortality, but we did not find any paper re: potatoes and mortality!”

Exactly 236 people died during the course of the study. After adjusting for a variety of factors — education, race, income, alcohol consumption and exercise, among other things — the researchers concluded that people who eat french fries more than twice a week are doomed. Doomed!

Okay, they didn’t actually say that. What they did say was that folks who ate “fried potatoes” two or more times a week “were at an increased risk of mortality.” And not the kind of minuscule increase that’s easy to brush off for those firmly committed to their death sticks. The researchers concluded that frequent fried potato eaters more than doubled their risk of premature death.