Skip to main content

Potatoes Ain't Paleo

A potato is a lump of sugar. -Guest on Jimmy Moore's podcast

Three years ago when I got into low carb diets and helping my mother control her diabetes, I gave myself a blood glucose test. Since I was wheat-free, I used a suggestion from the Blood Sugar 101 site: I ate a potato. That you can use a potato for a home glucose test should be the first clue that it isn't very good for you.

Further clues take a little more digging (sorry). It's a given in camp paleo that grains and beans are Neolithic foods--foods that we weren't eating much of, if any, before we started farming. They're full of lectins and antinutrients. But so are some other agricultural products: potatoes have been cultivated for around 7,000 years in Peru,(1) and spread to the rest of the world only in the past 500 years.(2) Even if you're Irish, German or Russian, your ancestors haven't been eating potatoes for more than a few hundred years. Traditionally, potatoes went through a process of freezing, soaking and drying(3) that got rid of the glycoalkaloids, or saponins.(4) (It sounds similar to the traditional processing of grains.) No more.

Saponins can penetrate the intestines, especially in people with diseases of chronic inflammation (including insulin resistance) which may trigger autoimmune diseases. Potatoes are also a major source of lectins.(5)

Potatoes have vitamin C and potassium--but would you eat a bowl of sugar and justify it by taking a vitamin pill? The main thing potatoes are good for is being a vehicle for lard, butter and salt. (Butter isn't paleo either, of course, but it won't jack up your blood sugar and doesn't contain any funny proteins.) Put the butter and salt on a piece of fish instead, and have some bacon on the side.

Want more info on the non-paleoness of potatoes and other tubers? Read this well-researched article.

1. "Finding Rewrites the Evolutionary History of the Origin of Potatoes." University of Wisconsin-Madison News. October 5, 2005.
2. II.B.3. Potatoes, White, The Cambridge World History of Food.
3. Nutrition and Physical Degradation by Weston A Price. Chapter 13, "Ancient Civilizations of Peru."
4.The Cambridge World History of Food.
4. The Paleo Answer by Loren Cordain. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Kindle Location 3381.

Comments

Hi Lori
I don't know very much about paleo but I do know that potatoes are not low carb. If my husband who is a Type 2 diabetic eats them his blood glucose numbers go way too high. We do not eat them in our house and avoid them on menu's if we eat out.We find most restaurants, if you ask them nicely, will serve an extra serving of low starch vegetables and leave the potatoes off the plate.

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
They're definitely not good for anyone with diabetes or wonky blood sugar. You can get a salad or cole slaw at pretty much any restaurant here in the US, too.
horfilmania said…
This is a great post. I'm Ukrainian and you may call our ethnic cuisine cookbook, "1001 ways to prepare potatoes." What I find amazing is that no one in my family had/has diabetes, although they all die from heart disease and stroke. Plus we are/were all fat/obese. Those of us who went low-carb are doing extremely well, but we sure miss our potatoes. Can't help it as we grew up on them. I'm just glad I was able to strong arm my brother and sister into following this way of eating. It's put my brother's (he's lost over 100 lbs) cancer into remission (7 years now, multiple myeloma) and my sister's (90 lbs gone) migraines, arthritis and acid reflux into a long forgotten memory. I certainly don't believe in safe starches for those of us who are starch intolerant.
Lori Miller said…
Wow, that's so great about your brother and sister! Your family probably just doesn't have the genes for diabetes, fortunately.

Popular posts from this blog

Gym Influencer Doubles Down and Should Have Regretted It

Jennifer Picone isn't the most abusive gym influencer--far from it--but she may be the most annoying. In a video she posted that went viral, she was working out in a gym when another member appeared in the background by the free weights. The member was minding her own business, not looking in Picone's direction, when Picone got up and told her to move. After filming, Picone edited the video with a note about "Gym etiquette lesson #47" and accused the other gym member of "[doing] that 💩 on purpose."  Shaming other gym members has gotten to be such a big genre that Joey Swoll has a YouTube channel, with half a million subscribers, dedicated to calling out these content creators. Just for Picone, he took a break from his vacation to tell her to mind her own business. This may be the first time that Joey Swoll has taken one of his followers to task. The fact that she follows him and still doesn't know better than to treat the gym like her personal studio sh...

Stay in your car!

If there's ever a lunatic outside your vehicle, do not engage. Stay in your vehicle. Drive away or call the police. Drive over the curb, lawn or median if necessary; just avoid putting innocent bystanders at risk.*  Save yourself from lunatics like a boss. Screen grab from video by Fredrik Sørlie on Youtube . That advice might have saved a 69-year-old delivery driver from being attacked by former NFL player Mark Sanchez, who for unknown reasons was in an alley after midnight in downtown Indianapolis and decided to pick a fight over a parking space. I say might have because I haven't seen any video of the attack. But other incidents over the years bear out the safety of staying in your car. A neighbor was assaulted and robbed after she got out of her car after someone followed her home and blocked her driveway. And remember Reginald Denny from the LA riots? The victim maced and stabbed Sanchez, but suffered a bad cut to his face and tongue and looks like he was badly beaten. Bo...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...

No-carb "cider" and Halloween videos you haven't seen

In time for Halloween, here's a recipe for no-carb "cider" to sip while you watch scary (or mildly spooky) videos. Photo from Pixabay . Ingredients: Hot water Constant Comment tea Doctor's Best magnesium powder in sweet peach flavor Steep a bag of Constant Comment tea in hot water for a few minutes and remove the bag. Add one scoop of magnesium powder (sweet peach flavor). The combination tastes surprisingly like hot apple cider, but with zero carbs. Only have one, or at most two, cups at a time--too much magnesium at once will have you running to the bathroom. Constant Comment tea tastes good on its own if you've maxed out your magnesium dose for the day. You can find both the tea and the magnesium powder at Vitacost.com. Kroger and other grocery stores carry Constant Comment tea, but I've never seen the magnesium powder at a grocery store. With a hot cup of ersatz cider, enjoy a video in the spirit of the season. The Amazing Mr. Blunden Family friendly; mild...

The Under-the-Radar Ointment for Hard-to-Heal Wounds

Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and finding the side of your head black and your ear twice its normal size. That's what happened to Brad Burnam, who caught a deadly superbug at the hospital where he worked. Sometime after having emergency surgery--one of 21 surgeries over the next five years--he set out to cure himself.  The result he created was a fusion of PHMB, an antibiotic common in Europe but little known in the US, in a petroleum jelly base (like Vaseline), held together with a stabilizer/emulsifier. It sticks to wounds, keeps them moist, and provides a barrier. It cured his antibiotic resistant superbug. After getting FDA clearance, he formed Turn Therapeutics, and Hexagen is now available by prescription.  Screen shot from https://turntherapeutics.com/about/ Millions of Americans suffer from open wounds--chronic issues like diabetic foot ulcers. Readers probably have their blood sugar under control and avoid this condition, but might have parents, partners o...