Eating potatoes is OK, but go easy on the French fries
Your Back Page scribbler grew up eating an awful lot of potatoes.
Being of Irish and English stock, and living in the deep south of New Zealand, the family ate spuds pretty much every single day.
Weeknights they were usually mashed, while on weekends they were often roasted. The exception was on Friday nights, because (being raised as Catholics) we got to have fish and chips – which were a real treat and completely negated the concept of not eating meat on those days as being some sort of sacrifice.
Often times the tasty tubers were dug up fresh from the backyard vegetable garden and the annual serving of the season’s “new” potatoes (boiled, with lots of butter) was a ritual as sacred as anything the Japanese could conjure up with their tea ceremonies.
So there’s not much we don’t know about consuming potatoes, which is why new research published this week in The BMJ caught our attention.
While it has occasionally crossed our minds that shovelling down such disproportionate quantities of murphies was not only quite boring, it also might not have been a brilliant dietary regimen, we now learn that it wasn’t overly harmful – at least when it comes to developing type 2 diabetes.
The reason for this is in the deep fryer. It’s not the potatoes themselves which cause the problem, it’s the way they are prepared that could be the big difference.
According to this Harvard research team, regularly eating boiled, mashed and baked taters does not substantially increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, but three or more weekly servings of chips (or French fries as they like to call them) is another matter.
The boffins based their findings on three studies carried out between 1984 and 2021 and involving more than 200,000 health professionals. The participants were free of diabetes, heart disease or cancer and completed detailed food questionnaires every four years.
During almost 40 years of follow up, 22,299 people were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
After adjusting for lifestyle and dietary factors related to diabetes risk, the researchers found that for every three weekly servings of total potato, the rate of type 2 diabetes increased by 5% and for every three weekly servings of French fries, the rate increased by 20%, the researchers said in a media release.
However, similar intake of baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes was not associated with a significantly increased risk.
But it wasn’t all good news for fans of the starchy tuber. The study team also found that replacing three weekly servings of total potato with whole grains lowered the type 2 diabetes rate by 8% and replacing French fries with whole grains lowered the rate by 19%.
Interestingly, replacing total potatoes or baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes with white rice was associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
“Our findings underscore that the association between potato intake and type 2 diabetes risk depends on the specific foods used as replacement,” the study authors said.
“The findings also align with current dietary recommendations that promote the inclusion of whole grains as part of a healthy diet for the prevention of type 2 diabetes.”
The authors also added that, being an observational study, no firm conclusions could be drawn about cause and effect and they could not rule out the possibility that other unmeasured factors might have influenced the results. As well, most of the study participants were also health professionals of European ancestry, so the findings might not apply to other populations.
We’d call that a mixed report card when it comes to the benefits and risks of the humble potato, but looking at the evidence from our own “n = 1” study group, we can confirm that we do not currently suffer from type 2 diabetes.
Having said that, it’s also been an awfully long time since we ate potatoes every Goddamned night of the week.
Enliven our news diet by serving up delectable story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
