Potatoes get a bad rap when it comes to nutrition – but is it deserved?
The humble and much maligned potato might have a place in our diet after all – just go easy on the frying and sour cream
In the past two decades, one piece of diet advice has remained consistent: eat more whole plant foods. More vegetables and fruits, more legumes and grains, more tubers and roots. There has been, from recollection, only one notable exception, and it is the beleaguered potato. Eat more plants – just not potatoes. Why? One word: starch.
Starch is made up of molecules of glucose, a simple sugar, which our cells can use as fuel with very little processing from our bodies. It goes right to the bloodstream, and the blood sugar spike prompts the pancreas to release insulin, which enables our body to either use or store that sugar. When that’s done, we’re hungry again. The quicker it happens, the sooner we start casing the kitchen, looking for our next meal, and the fatter we get.
That’s the theory, at any rate, but there’s no potato consensus in the nutrition community. Spearheading the anti-potato side is Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Potatoes don’t behave like most other vegetables,” he says. “In study after study, potatoes do not seem to have the benefit of reducing cardiovascular disease, and they are related to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.” They’re also associated with weight gain and hypertension, he notes.
But the key word there is “associated”, and Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, is unwilling to finger potatoes as the cause of that litany of health problems. “This is using one particular food or nutrient as a reductive explanation for diseases and problems that are very complicated and have multiple causes,” she says. “It’s nutritionism.”