In a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine (June 23, 2011) there was a study published entitled Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men. I first found about about this study from the following WSJ video produced the same day the journal issue was published.
When I heard the part about the potatoes it shocked me. I guess I should reveal my slight bias here, I grew up on a potato farm and my Dad still goes seed potatoes in Montana. But I was still shocked, since when is eating a vegetable bad for you? This just didn’t sit right.
I heard the study cited several times during the day including on a local radio talk show. Each time I heard it they pointed out that potatoes were found to contribute to more weight gain than anything else they looked at, just behind potato chips.
I decided to take a closer look at the study. Now I didn’t read the whole thing, but I did see this little nugget of information that some how no one else decided to share or at least was miss represented. Under the results section of the article there is a table of information (Table 2. Pooled, Multivariable-Adjusted Results for the Relationships between Changes in Dietary Habits and Weight Change.). In this table it shows the “Potatoes” category. According to this table over a 4 year period potatoes contribute on average about 1.28 lbs to a persons weight. But there was a little footnote to the potato:
For the categories … potatoes … subtypes were evaluated together in the full, multivariable-adjusted model in place of the overall food group.
Meaning that the two subtypes underneath potatoes (french fried and boiled, baked, mashed) were lumped in together. This confirmed my suspicion. People had been reporting that potatoes were bad for you contributing significantly to weight gain. But what this table tells me is that french fries not potatoes in general contribute significantly to weight gain. French fries indeed were found to contribute an average of (low end) 2.29 lbs over 4 years while other forms of potatoes (boiled, baked, and mashed) contributed 0.26 lbs.
People, please don’t misrepresent the facts. Potatoes are not bad for you. The way you eat them (what you put on them) might be, but the potato in and of itself it actually really good for you.
What I got from this study, be smart.
