Eat French fries and get diabetes—eat boiled spuds, and don’t

Eat French fries (chips) three times a week and you increase your risk of type 2 diabetes.

But substitute fries for boiled or mashed potatoes, and the risk disappears, a new study has discovered.

Three servings of French fries every week raises your diabetes risk by around 20 percent—and that’s because they are high on the Glycaemic Index (GI), which measures the speed that foods release sugar.

It’s all down to the way that potatoes are cooked:  a similar quantity of boiled or baked spuds doesn’t feature high on the GI, and so doesn’t increase the diabetes risk, say researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

They took another look at three major studies that had investigated the impact of different foods on the health of 205,000 people; during the 40 years the studies ran, more than 22,000 of them developed type 2 diabetes.

They discovered that replacing potatoes of any kind with wholegrains is a good strategy for reducing your diabetes risk—but white rice raises it again.  For every three weekly servings of any type of potato, the rate of type 2 diabetes increased by 5 percent and for every three weekly servings of French fries, the rate increased by 20 per cent.

Replacing three weekly servings of potatoes with whole grains lowered the type 2 diabetes rate by 8 percent, and substituting baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes with whole grains lowered the rate by 4 percent, and replacing French fries lowered the rate by 19 percent.

So, it’s not just about eating potatoes—it’s about the way they’re prepared that really makes the difference.

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