Do potato eaters live longer or shorter lives than non-potato eaters?
Is there a relationship between potato consumption and the prevalence of hypertension? Harvard researchers followed diet and disease of more than 100,000 men and women over decades and found that those who ate potatoes most days – not just french fries and potato chips, but even baked, boiled or fried – had a lower risk of developing high blood pressure. But what do people leave? in potatoes? Salt, not butter, so maybe potatoes are just innocent people? Researchers have tried to unravel the effects of salt and saturated fat, and so far there is a link between potato consumption and high blood pressure.
Maybe potato eaters are meat and potato people. After all, these are the same Harvard researchers found that meat, including chicken, appeared to be independently associated with an increased risk of hypertension, and the same was true for moderate amounts of canned tuna. Thus, they took care in the study of potatoes try to take into account any effect of consumption of all types of animal meat. However, they still found a high risk and expressed concern that potato consumption with hypertension could be a “significant public health problem”. It was thought that potatoes could actually lower high blood pressure, given their high potassium content, but they found evidence of the opposite effect.
As I discuss in my video Do potatoes increase the risk of high blood pressure and death?two similar studies done in the Mediterranean, no association was found between potato consumption and high blood pressure. Maybe it’s because they don’t eat their potatoes with butter and sour cream in that neck of the woods, they eat them with other vegetables instead. Now, Harvard researchers tried to control for the salty and fatty components of the diet associated with eating potatoes in the West, just as these researchers tried to account for all the extra vegetables, but you can’t control everything.
One of the main reasons we care about blood pressure is because we care about its consequences. In two studies conducted in Sweden, there was no evidence that they mostly ate their potatoes boiled. found that potato consumption was associated with the risk of major cardiovascular diseases. There was no association between potato consumption and the risk of premature death found in southern Italy as well. But in the United States, the consumption of potatoes was related with increased mortality: 65% increased risk of death from heart disease, 26% increased risk of fatal stroke, 50% increased risk of death from cancer, and increased risk of death from all causes combined. However, this association disappeared after adjustment for confounding factors. In other words, it was not a potato at all. Potato eaters must smoke more, drink more or eat saturated fat or something. When you control for all these other factors, the association between potatoes and death disappears.
This was it confirmed in the NIH-AARP study, the largest nutrition and health study in human history. If you single out potatoes, researchers find that they are not associated with an increased risk of death, with the possible exception of French fries, which are associated with an increased risk of death from cancer. Put all the studies together — 20 in all — and there was no significant association found between potato consumption and death, although again, fried potatoes can to be exception Even just twice a week, potatoes doubled the risk of premature death regardless of other factors, but consumption of fried potatoes was neutral.
I’ve talked a lot about how not all foods are plant-based was created equally as well as healthy and unhealthy plant-based diets. To this end, the researchers developed not only an overall plant-based diet index (PDI)—just a plant-based assessment of animal foods—but also a plant-based healthy diet index (hPDI) and an unhealthy plant-based diet index (uPDI). The healthy index focuses on whole plant foods, while the unhealthy index shows how many low-quality plant foods you eat, ranking potatoes along with soda, cake, and weird bread. When you run the numbers, the more you plant based eatthe longer you live, the lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. In other words, eating more plant-based and less animal-based is associated with a significantly lower risk of premature death. However, this benefit was limited to those who ate the healthiest plant-based diets. However, the researchers were surprised to find that those who ate healthy plant-based diets and processed plant waste did not live significantly shorter lives. Maybe it’s just because they ate less animal products, and that’s actually a major factor in longevity here, or maybe the lack of association between healthy plant-based diets and death is because potatoes came to the rescue. And indeed, eating more potatoes seemed to be protective; So, given these conflicting results, future studies may consider simply dropping fried potatoes on the harmful list.
Now, according to mortality, fried potatoes can not to be bad like fried meat-fried chicken and fried fish-but this is really said, not much. The French info/death gave the Potatoes USA trade group a bit of a chip on their shoulder. to remind readers that observational studies can only prove correlation, not causation, as the authors contend answered“Our data add to the urgent public health calls to limit consumption of fried potatoes.” French fries may be so bad for you that it’s unethical to do interventional studies and randomize people to eat them.
Dr.’s comment
This is the second in a five-part series on potatoes. It was the first part Do potatoes increase the risk of diabetes?.
Apart from French fries, potato consumption is not associated with death. Potato eaters tend to live about as long as non-potato eaters. This is really bad news. A whole plant food that isn’t associated with longevity? One that has a neutral effect on life expectancy? This is a missed opportunity. But what if you really like white potatoes? Then you need to cool and heat them as I explain in my next video.
Coming up:
For more information on preventing and treating high blood pressure, see the related articles below.
