New Study Shows Potatoes Are Not Unhealthy – Here’s What’s Actually Causing Health Issues!

New Study Shows Potatoes Are Not Unhealthy – Here’s What’s Actually Causing Health Issues!
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While science generally agrees that vegetables are good for you, there are a few that are not held to the same standard, one of them being the potato!

However, some new research shows that this not so healthy vegetable is not as bad for us as we have previously thought.

The truth is that it depends on how it’s cooked!

More precisely, it appears that rather than the vegetable itself, what links potatoes to health problems such as Type 2 diabetes is the way they’re prepared and what we tend to add to it.

The new research was published in Diabetes Care, a peer-reviewed journal.

This specification was quite welcome given the many previous studies that have associated total potato intake with diabetes without paying any attention to these other variables.

Most recently, this team of Australian researchers, led by Dr. Nicola Bondonno, looked into the link between the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and vegetable intake.

They also studied the relationship between the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and potato consumption in particular.

The research featured more than 54,000 participants with ages between 50 and 64, all of whom were recruited from the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health cohort.

All the participants were required to fill out a 192-item “food frequency questionnaire” at the very beginning of the research.

Co-author Pratik Pokharel noted that they recorded how often a certain food item was consumed in the past 12 months.

Pokharel shared with Fox News Digital that “The intake of foods and of nutrients were estimated using standard recipes and the software FoodCalc.”

Aside from confirming that those who consumed more vegetables had a 21 percent smaller risk of Type 2 diabetes, they also learned that participants with the highest potato consumption showed a 9 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with the same disease when compared to the group that ate the smallest amount of potato.

However, in a press release Pokharel stressed that “When we separated boiled potatoes from mashed ones or fries, boiled potatoes were no longer associated with a higher risk of developing diabetes. They had a null effect.”

In reality, the research discovered that those who consumed the most potatoes also ate more red meat, butter and drank more soft drinks, all known to increase the risk of being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

“When you account for it, boiled potatoes are just no longer associated with diabetes. It is only fries and mashed potatoes, the latter most likely because [they are] usually made with butter, cream and the like. People eat food rarely in isolation. We should look at the bigger picture when assessing the correct relationship between dietary intake and disease incidence. It is crucial to look at the dietary pattern and food processing ways to see what other culprits are than blaming on one food,” Pokharel went on to share during the same press release.


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Katherine is just getting her start as a journalist. She attended a technical school while still in high school where she learned a variety of skills, from photography to nutrition. Her enthusiasm for both natural and human sciences is real so she particularly enjoys covering topics on medicine and the environment.

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