We love our potatoes.

They show up everywhere, and are often the star on special occasions—mashed for Thanksgiving, baked for Christmas or served up for a birthday breakfast treat as hash browns.

It’s hard to believe there could be anything harmful about the good old spud, but studies show excessive consumption of them (like anything really) might have some unexpected health risks.

Unfortunately for potato-enthusiasts, a recent study published in the BMJ found that eating too many potatoes in a week could increase our risk of high blood pressure. But before we all start shedding tears over our tubers, let’s break down the study to see what it really shows us.

Why investigate potatoes?

You might be thinking, “Wait—why isolate potatoes for a study about hypertension in the first place? Obviously, these researchers were biased, potato-haters from the start!” Although I understand your outrage, they had good reason to look at potatoes in particular.

There’s always been a bit of a controversy over potatoes’ health benefits. The researchers point out that a government program to improve lunch meals for school children and low-income diets, the Hunger-Free Act originally limited starchy vegetables like potatoes to just one cup a week. That was in 2010, but a similar program from 2009 excluded white potatoes from its cash voucher. Even the World Health Organization doesn’t recognize potatoes as a real vegetable—they’re actually roots and don’t count as part of your daily fruit or veggie intake.

Potatoes and glucose.

Maybe the jury is still out on whether potatoes are really vegetables or not, but there’s some reason behind questioning whether or not they’re good for our blood. Since they’re so starchy, they’re full of carbohydrates, which themselves aren’t necessarily a bad thing. However, Harvard Health Publications says that just 150 grams of boiled white potatoes scores 82 out of 100 on the Glycemic Index, which means carbs from potatoes quickly turn to sugar in your blood and make your pancreas work harder to produce insulin, or even overproduce it.

But what about the benefits?

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) says potatoes have a lot going for them. You need some carbs for energy, so in moderation maybe potatoes aren’t so bad for your blood sugar. Plus, they have Vitamin B and C, fiber, and potassium. This help explains why potatoes were actually added to those healthy programs mentioned above.

However, like most scientists, the researchers were curious—no other studies had really looked at how potatoes affected hypertension. Challenge accepted!

What the study actually said.

To see how potatoes affected hypertension, the researchers analyzed data from some reliable and well-known studies like the Nurses’ Health Study I and II as well as the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. In total, there were well over 180,000 people in these studies. They were given questionnaires about the food they ate and how often they ate it, which they completed every few years. They also provided details about their health such as hypertension.

Participants were asked about a lot of different foods (over 130) when they took the questionnaires, but one of the questions asked how often they ate baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes, and a separate question asked about consuming potatoes in the form of chips or French fries. Well, we know where that one’s headed…

The conclusion was that hypertension increased 11 percent when people ate baked, boiled or mashed potatoes four or more times a week. When participants ate French fries, the risk was even higher, 17 percent.

Hold up. What about salt? Maybe the people in the study were just dousing their taters in sodium and that’s what made their blood pressure rise.

Nope, the researchers adjusted for salt and other factors, but that didn’t really change the results. It seems like a whole lotta potatoes really may increase your risk of hypertension.

But why?

The researchers aren’t 100 percent sure why potatoes appear to increase hypertension, but they have some theories.

• Their high glycemic level—remember how potatoes turn to sugar really quickly in the bloodstream? Researchers think this might play a role. When you eat foods like this, they also cause inflammation and oxidative stress, which can have negative effects on your blood vessels.

• They cause weight gain—when the participants ate more potatoes, they gained more weight, researchers say. However, since the researchers took weight gain into account when calculating their results, they doubt this was a factor.

• Gender-linkd factors—researchers noticed that women who ate more potato chips were more likely to have hypertension but the same wasn’t true for men

But what does this mean for my dinner-plate?

Given the results, and how widespread common health problems like hypertension and obesity are in the United States, some say government food programs should probably cut out potatoes again. However, not everyone agrees.

An editorial in the BMJ called the researchers out, saying isolating just one food isn’t really helpful—so many factors go into your diet and your health that it’s not likely that just one food could cause such drastic health effects. Instead, we should be looking at a diet as a whole instead of trying to demonize specific foods.

And the lead author of the study herself noted, “We don’t completely know what a healthy diet is, and I have no opinions about what people should eat. It’s important that studies like this continue the discussion.”

In the end, there’s still so much we don’t understand about how diet affects our health—we only have to look at the hundreds of diets out there to realize there is no one definitive, clear-cut answer.

In the meantime, eating a potato or two probably is unlikely to do us in. The old saying “everything in moderation,” is probably the best way forward.

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Relephant good news: Sweet potatoes are an entirely different thing, so enjoy ’em all you like (till some study says otherwise)…

Baked Sweet Potato Fries. {Gluten Free, Vegan Recipe}

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Author: Daisy Grace

Editor: Khara-Jade Warren

Image: Taz/ Flickr

 

 

 

Image: Courtesy of Author