Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable–But You're Eating Them Wrong

1. There are big differences between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and management of them are (for the most part) very different. Distinguishing between the two is important.

2. Please be mindful of making declarative statements about the risks associated with diabetics and foods.

A small red potato is ~27g of carbs, a couple of potatoes to non-diabetics may seem harmless but for a T1 diabetic, 54g of carbs from couple of potatoes not being accounted for with insulin can easily result in going into DKA (Diabetic Ketoacidosis) and not so nice stay in the hospital.

Expanding a bit on the reasons why potato is recommended to be avoided:

For type 1 diabetics, we are essentially replacing the functionality our immune system is suppressing by "manually" providing the needed insulin to process the glucose.

Since T2 diabetics do produce insulin (it's way more complex than this but it's correct enough for this post), the focus for their treatments are mostly around fixing this resistance through medications and reducing the need for insulin by limiting carb intake.

While the carb density of starches is a big reason for avoiding them, the specific reason T1 diabetics are advised to avoid them is because of how slowly your body breaks down carbohydrates from these foods after consuming.

Eating 20g of carbs from potatoes will result in those carbs getting processed over the span of hours as opposed to foods like Orange Juice which feel like they skip the stomach and dump glucose straight into the blood stream.

It's that long gap of time between eating and all the carbohydrates being processed that is trying to be avoided.

For T1's, removing those foods from our diet makes predicting a given meal's impact on your BG levels and for how long they're affected much simpler.

Kinda Related Small PSA:

We know you mean well but asking a diabetic the question "Should you be eating that?" can be very irritating and, at least for me, comes off as demeaning. While you may only be asking it once, we hear it frequently and already spend 16 hours a day thinking about the disease so let us have those 20 minutes between injections and finger pricks to forget about it and feel normal, if only for a little bit Sorry for the wall of text, this topic is just so dense and nuanced that it's way too easy to end up writing a book for what seems like something so small lol.

A few times I tried eating only steamed white potatoes for a few days, it appealed to my all-or-nothing mentality (and desire to reduce mental overhead in choosing what to eat). Inspired by this https://potatohack.com It was about eight years ago. I didn't get tired of potatoes. It was cheap. If I remember correctly I spiced things up by making chicken broth into gravy by mixing in potato starch.

Haha, I think you have mildly violated your own rule 2! Anyway, you're right that almost any statement about nutrition and diabetes can be disagreed with and picked apart. Ultimately, nutrition is complex and highly personal and exponentially more so when metabolic disorders are at play!

Taking this specific example:

"...the specific reason T1 diabetics are advised to avoid them is because of how slowly your body breaks down carbohydrates from these foods after consuming."

In my experience most medical professionals lump all potato preparations together as "high-GI foods" and therefore advise that they will raise blood sugar much more quickly than other sources of starchy carbohydrates such as oats, whole-wheat bread, or brown rice. This is backed up by evidence that, for example, baked potatoes can have a GI of higher than 100 (i.e. they raise blood sugar faster than the same number of grams of pure glucose) [1].

Your experience seems to be the opposite, since you claim a "slow" break down. And that's backed by research also! It turns out that the GI of a potato can be drastically changed by cooking method. [2]. Boiling and then cooling a potato causes starches to first gelatinize (raising GI) and then undergo retrogradation, in which hard-to-digest "resistant starch" is reformed (lowering GI again). For those reasons, a cold potato salad (with cooked-and-cooled potato) made with new potatoes (lower GI to begin with due to higher amylose) and mixed with fats (which further reduce GI), might have a shockingly low GI compared to a fresh fluffy baked potato.

All of that to nit-pick the details of your post while agreeing with your overall thesis. This topic is extremely nuanced!

[1] Miller et al. (1992) - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Found baked potato to have GI of 121 ± 9

[2] Ek et al. (2012) - Food & Function: Reported GI values ranging from 56 to 94 for different preparations

I don't think you're properly accounting for the heartburn that would result from consuming that much oil... you could be turned off food for a whole day!

> Haha, I think you have mildly violated your own rule 2!

Yeah, but just a little though! (Plus, I got the beetus so I get a little slack right? Lol).

But yeah, potatoes are a really fun one. I think French fries are going to be the more common way potatoes get consumed in the US and in my experience it's almost always a side for a high fat main course. I'd wager it's these exact complex scenarios that lead Doctors to just avoid trying to explain the nuance to diabetics and instead just have a blanket policy of "stay away from it".

I mean, after a decade with the disease (I didn't catch it until I was in my mid 20's so I didn't grow up learning the stuff), I have not had a single doctor and had exactly 1 Nurse Practitioner actually bring up fiber and its role in calculating insulin boluses before meals.

All that said, I'm going to break rule 2 for real and declare Pizza to be the most evil food ever from a diabetic standpoint. Starches in the dough, sugars from all the tomato sauce, tons of fats and proteins from the cheese and meats, I honestly don't think I will ever be able to accurately predict how a couple slices of Pizza will decide to break down on a given day lmao.