Doughnuts are a type of fried dough confectionery or dessert food. They are popular in many countries and are prepared in various forms as a sweet snack that can be homemade or purchased in bakeries, supermarket, food stalls, and franchised specialty vendors. Take a look below for 28 more fun and fascinating facts about doughnuts.

1. Doughnuts are usually deep fried from a flour dough, and typically either ring-shaped or a number of shapes without a hole, and are filled.

2. Various batters and toppings can be used, such as sugar, chocolate, or maple glazing.

3. Doughnuts may also include water, leavening, eggs, milk, sugar, oil shortening and natural or artificial flavors.

4. The two most common types are the ring doughnut and the filled doughnut, which is injected with fruit preserves, cream, custard and other sweet fillings.

5. Once fried, doughnuts can be glazed with a sugar icing, spread with icing or chocolate on top, or topped with powdered sugar or sprinkles or fruit.

6. While food resembling doughnuts has been found at many ancient sites, the earliest origins to the modern doughnuts are generally tracked back to the olykoek which Dutch settlers brought with them to early New York.

7. One of the earliest mentions of doughnut was in Washington Irving’s 1809 book “A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty.”

8. The name “olykoek” was almost certainly related to the oliekoek, which is a Dutch delicacy of sweetened cake fried in fat.

9. According to anthropologist Paul R. Mullins, the first cookbook that mentioned doughnuts was an 1803 English volume which included doughnuts in an appendix of American recipes.

10. Hanson Gregory, an American, claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 aboard a lime-trading ship when he was 16 years old. He claimed to have punched a hole in the center of the dough with the ship’s tin pepper box and to have later taught the technique to his mother.

11. Adolph Levitt, A Russian-born immigrant, invented the first automated doughnut machine in 1920. He called it the “Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Donut Machine.”

12. A type of doughnut is mentioned in the Bible. Specifically, Chapter 7 Verse 12 of Leviticus says that a thanksgiving to God should be made of, “cakes mingled with oil, of fine flour, fried.”

13. Over 10 billion doughnuts are made in the United States each year.

14. On December 12, 2010, Shamus Petherick of Australia set the record for the most powdered doughnuts eaten in 3 minutes when he ate six.

15. One of Cosmopolitan Magazine’s most infamous sex tips  was “doughnut on a penis,” which suggested that a woman place a doughnut on a man’s penis while giving oral sex.

16. The first recorded use of the word “donut” is found in the 1900 story “Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa” by George W. Peck. A character is quoted as saying, “Pa said he guessed he hadn’t got much appetite and he would just drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut.”

17. If a person added a doughnut a day to their regular diet, they would gain about one extra pound every 10 days.

18. According to one report, doughnuts have more trans fat than chocolate, peanut butter chocolate bars, and chips. A single doughnut will meet the maximum amount of trans fat for one day.

19. National Donut Day is one the first Friday of every June. The holiday was established in 1938 to celebrate the Salvation Army Workers who supplied free donuts to American troops during World War I.

20. The longest line of donuts every recorded stretched 1,841 feet 10 inches in Berlin on April 27, 2014.

21. In the 1934, movie It Happened One Night, Clark Gable gave birth to the trend of dunking donuts in milk when he showed a fellow actor the “right way to do it.”

22. Among Americans of German descent, jelly donuts have long been thought to bring good luck to those who eat them on New Year’s Eve.

23. Even before people would trick or treat for candy, Halloween was celebrated by bobbing for donuts hung from a string.

24. One reason doughnuts are so addictive is that they have lots of saccharine. In one study, rats overwhelmingly prefer water sweetened with saccharin to cocaine, which demonstrated the addictiveness of sweets in general and doughnuts in particular.

25. Whalers sometimes celebrated the 1,000th barrel of whale oil by frying doughnuts in whale oil.

26. Doughnuts can be up to 25% fat because they absorb so much of the fat they’re fried in.

27. The enduring stereotype of the police officer with a donut emerged in the 1940s and 1950s when the only places open during the graveyard shift were donut shops. Donut shops were typically open late at night or very early in the morning as they prepared fresh donuts for the morning rush.

28. Researchers have noted that the size of the hole in a doughnut correlates with the quality of the economy. Specifically, the worse the economy, the bigger the doughnut hole.