Within Five Seconds
The moment that deep-fried Klondike bar hits your tongue, your body begins the big task of digesting and metabolizing it. As you chew, enzymes produced by your salivary glands start to break down some of the starches into simpler molecules called maltose.

Within One Minute
The chewed food travels from the back of your mouth down your esophagus and into your stomach, your body's holding tank. Because the deep-fried delight lacks crucial nutrients (copper, zinc, magnesium) that aid digestion, it will take your stomach as long as four hours to churn the treat's 28 fat grams and 500 calories in preparation for its next destination, your small intestine. By now, up to 20 percent more blood than usual has started rushing to the blood vessels in your stomach area, providing digestion-fueling energy.

Within Five Minutes
Hello, sugar rush! Your stomach empties the sugar (aka sucrose) into your small intestine. There, it's digested into glucose and fructose—carbohydrates that are absorbed through your intestinal walls into your blood. They send a signal to the pancreas to release insulin into the blood, which transports the sugars to your cells to be used as fuel.

Your body starts feeling charged up now, like you could run a marathon. But because so much of your blood has been diverted to your gut, a run would leave you shaky or nauseated. Instead, you settle for the sugar high your brain is on. When it catches a hint of the glucose pulsing through your veins, it starts sending out feel-good chemicals like endorphins and serotonin.

Within One Hour
Your energy crashes because the fuel offered by the glucose pumped into your cells has been burned up and your blood sugar levels bottom out again. Those feel-good chemicals also start to wear off, and your mood takes a nosedive, restarting the cycle of craving and eating to feel good again.

Within Four Hours
Your stomach finishes its work on the fats and empties them into the small intestine. Here, they get broken down into some smaller molecules like fatty acids and cholesterol, which move into your liver and then into your circulatory system. Fatty acids like omega-3s are healthy fuel for the heart, but the kind you're getting from a deep-fried ice cream bar are trans fats. They, along with cholesterol, just hang out on the walls of your arteries, where—if they're joined by more cholesterol over time—build up and can eventually prevent vital, oxygen-rich blood from getting to the heart.

Later On
Eating fried foods regularly clogs your arteries. It has also been linked to increased risk for cancers and is known to cause inflammation, which is often followed by diabetes. That's not even mentioning the pounds you'll pack on.