I've never even heard of this. We boil potatoes before we mash them, but that's the only time I've ever boiled them. There is also the option to bake smaller potatoes (golden or red) and eat them with just seasoning on them, no butter or other dairy products.
One of our family's favorites is when I cook "fries" in coconut oil at home. They crisp up really well and don't leave that film in your mouth like fast food fries do. Plus, the added bonus of no vegetable oils.
If you peel them before you cook them in salted water, they become a high-mid tier snack. I have tasted some shite potatoes too though (make sure they are waxy potatoes)
What's plain? You typically eat them together with other foods, perhaps most notably for potatoes meat juice from the meat you're eating. In English that's called "gravy" but that seems to imply doing various weird things to it. You don't eat a boiled potato all by itself.
That being said, if the potato doesn't taste good all by itself it's not a good potato.
'Since mass-produced potato products don’t use olive or other fruit oils, the answer is more specifically: Seed oils.'
You can find potato chips (purportedly) made with olive oil or avocado oil. Until recently, Boulder Canyon also made a version using coconut oil, which, sadly, they've discontinued. I even called them to confirm that when it disappeared from my grocery store.
This is leaving out what's been written about the difficulties of finding genuine, unadulterated olive oil (maybe avocado oil too).
I love Boulder Canyon potato chips for this reason but wonder if deep frying in olive oil is damaging in some other way even if it lowers seed oil levels.
I avoid mass produced foods for this reason. They always use those 'heart healthy' seeds oils. People have forgotten that cooking quality good food is easy and cheap. Yesterday I did beef stew for two, 500g organic beef, an onion & two carrots, pressure cooked with a bit of tallow for 30 mins - costing about £6 in the UK. Sit on a small amount of boiled potato to soak up the gravy. Stuffed.
" aka seed oils, are also causative in obesity, then adjusting for BMI would be invalid, as one cannot adjust by a factor that is involved in the causative pathway. "
I'm glad you pointed that out, because I wasn't sure if I read that right.
Wonder if those numbers for meat account for the very common consumption of fries along with the meat. Would be interesting if you could get separate numbers for chicken fried in peanut oil (eg Chick Fil A, etc) - so often eaten in conjunction with those tasty waffle fries.
Apparently, American scientists are loath to study chicken consumption, likely because white meat is considered healthier than red meat. Purdue university researchers commented on the situation. (2023) “Poultry meats, in particular chicken, have high rates of consumption globally. Poultry is the most consumed type of meat in the United States (US), with chicken being the most common type of poultry consumed. The amounts of chicken and total poultry consumed in the US have more than tripled over the last six decades… Limited evidence from randomized controlled trials indicates the consumption of lean unprocessed chicken as a primary dietary protein source has either beneficial or neutral effects on body weight and body composition and risk factors for CVD and T2DM. Apparently, zero randomized controlled feeding trials have specifically assessed the effects of consuming processed chicken/poultry on these health outcomes.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10459134/
In a 2021 article entitled 'The under-appreciated fats of life' Australian Zoologist Anthony Hulbert, PhD concluded, "I note that we are only beginning to understand the implications of the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fats in the human diet... Over the last half-century, the modern human food chain has emphasised omega-6 and diminished omega-3 intake, largely because of: (i) a shift from animal fats to vegetable oils, (ii) an increase in grain-fed meat and dairy, and (iii) a decline in full-fat dairy products from grass-fed livestock (an important source of omega-3). In the opinion of the current author and others, these diet trends are likely to be responsible for the increased incidence of obesity and other modern epidemics of chronic disease,..." https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/224/8/jeb232538/256572/The-under-appreciated-fats-of-life-the-two-types
Excerpt from Page 56 of Hulbert's 2023 'Omega Balance' book. "The contribution of 'pork and poultry' to animal-sourced foods was 20 percent in 1961 and 41 percent in 2018…Between 1961 and 2018 there was a dramatic worldwide increase in the supply of fats from sources that have very low omega balances. Fat from 'pork and poultry' was greatest in North America for the entire 1961-2018 period, while for Australia and South America, the contribution from 'pork and poultry' was the World average level in 1961 and showed the greatest absolute increases (about 16 g) over this period to be similar to North America and Europe in 2018. There was negligible change in Africa over this period."
In 2020, a Siberian Federal University researcher commented on the change in the omega-3/6 balance of the food supply. “The dietary value of the Yakutian horse meat is very high precisely due to the ideal balance of polyunsaturated omega-3 and omega-6 acids, 1:1 ratio of these acids is ideal for us, but civilization is steadily shifting the balance towards the predominance of omega-6 due to the dominance of vegetable oils, cheap pork and fast food in our daily diet. We also need omega-6 acids, but in combination with the omega-3 partners, which are found mainly in fatty fish. The horse meat we tested is also very good, especially for child nutrition and the diet of people suffering from cardiovascular diseases. If the population of Yakutia starts consuming mass-market products, which are now imported abundantly into the republic, and makes a choice in favor of, let us say, semi-finished pork products, this may drastically affect people's health. This is just the case when you should not change a time-tested balanced diet,” concluded Olesia Makhmutova. https://www.sfu-kras.ru/en/news/23160
Of course, as anybody who folloows endocannabinoid system research knows, "Experimental and clinical intervention studies suggest that omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids have opposing physiological and metabolic properties and elicit divergent effects on body fat gain through mechanisms of adipogenesis, browning of adipose tissue, lipid homeostasis, systemic inflammation and an increase in the tone of the endocannabinoid system. Overweight and obese individuals have higher levels of the arachidonic acid (AA) derived endocannabinoid N-arachidonoylethanolamine (AEA) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) and an altered pattern of receptor expression. Since endocannabinoids are products of dietary fats, modification of the omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acid intake modulates the endocannabinoids, with eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) displacing AA from cell membranes, reducing AEA and 2-AG production, resulting in decrease in appetite and food intake leading to weight loss." https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full_html/2020/01/ocl190046s/ocl190046s.html
I may have missed something, but I'm confused as to why you chose to focus on seed oils rather than the fact that those two preparations of potato are fried in oil.
Surely that in itself is sufficient to explain the difference, without having to gesture towards vaguely conspiratorial explanations involving something that has been studied a lot and seems to be completely fine.
Always baffling how researchers seem to be completely unaware of what the results of their work shows and instead systematically choose to pander to some kind of narrative more often than not completely orthogonal to their studies. Is there pressure to conform to the standard "healthy" messages? Is it something social? Is there corruption? Are they just not that clever?
It's really puzzling. You cannot "just read the abstract" anymore.
Also in this study as in many others, sugars and weight gain seem to be fairly unrelated.
Brad Marshall's recent post talks about how people used to consume more than 100g of sugar a day in the 1950s... Another world is possible.
Excellent work, thank you!
EDIT: Just got to the part discussing funding... LOL!
I'm a seed-oil-disrespecter currently doing a SMTM potato riff, and while my trial isn't over i'm fairly confident already that any time I fry potatoes in coconut oil I defeat the benefits of the diet. I suspect i could become obese eating ad-lib potatoes that I fried myself in beef tallow. They're just so delicious there's no way to stop eating them until they're gone, and while the oil is still hot they're only 'gone' when I stop peeling and slicing the damn things.
Tldr; f**k seed oil fries yes, but even 'good' fries seem problematic.
Both Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz failed to familiarize themselves with eicosanoid, endocannabinoid system, and arachidonic acid research. And, it's no wonder because there are no science writers anywhere in the World who write about this body of research. Consider this comment by Norwegian animal science researchers. "Eicosanoids are major players in the pathogenesis of several common diseases, with either overproduction or imbalance (e.g. between thromboxanes and prostacyclins) often leading to worsening of disease symptoms. Both the total rate of eicosanoid production and the balance between eicosanoids with opposite effects are strongly dependent on dietary factors, such as the daily intakes of various eicosanoid precursor fatty acids, and also on the intakes of several antioxidant nutrients including selenium and sulphur amino acids. Even though the underlying biochemical mechanisms have been thoroughly studied for more than 30 years, neither the agricultural sector nor medical practitioners have shown much interest in making practical use of the abundant high-quality research data now available."
As for arachidonic acid research, this 1996 comment puts things in perspective. "Excessive signaling of arachidonic acid (AA) metabolites has been associated with various chronic degenerative or autoimmune diseases, and intervention with the metabolism of AA is widely employed therapeutically in these afflictions. In essence, AA is the most biologically active unsaturated fatty acid in higher animals. Its concentration in membranes and its magnitude of effects depend on its amount, or that of its precursors and analogues, in the diet. The tendency of the field of nutrition to ignore the role of dietary AA will optimistically be reversed in the future." The article also said, "The underlying rationale for this symposium is that dietary AA is perhaps the single most important nutritional determinant in regulating AA levels in Americans. This may ultimately account in part for the striking differences in chronic diseases between strict vegetarians and the bulk of the omnivorous population." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022316622017333?via%3Dihub
Odd that the antics of Michael Jacobson's Center for Science in the Public Interest are not mentioned here. French fries were not always this bad. Decades ago, the CSPI succeeded in a crusade to get McDonald's to replace the beef tallow they had been frying them in with those wonderfully healthy natural vegetable oils - trans fats. :-) Subsequently they have hidden how they pushed them and other dangerous factory made substitutes for genuine natural products used for millennia, and write fictional accounts of the period, casting themselves as heroes.
Actually, it was Phil Sokolof who spearheaded the drive to reduce the saturated fat content of fast food. Sokolof was 43 when he sufferd a near fatal heart attack in 1966.
There is evidence that reducing arachidonic acid intake by adopting a Mediterranean style diet has a favorable impact on metabolic markers of health. "The Mediterranean diet is low in arachidonic acid and rich in healthy fats such as monounsaturated fats found in extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), nuts and omega-3 fatty acids from fish, which has been shown to lower the risk of inflammation, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity, and other degenerative diseases." https://advancedmolecularlabs.com/blogs/news/new-red-meat-study-controversy
When I did eat cereal for a snack I would always get crazy bloated. (a long time ago). Just Right, which is claimed to be for athletes but has the same amount of protein as all the other boxed junk next to it on the shelf.
I can't imagine eating a boiled potato plain.
They are still palatable with salt and pepper.
I've never even heard of this. We boil potatoes before we mash them, but that's the only time I've ever boiled them. There is also the option to bake smaller potatoes (golden or red) and eat them with just seasoning on them, no butter or other dairy products.
One of our family's favorites is when I cook "fries" in coconut oil at home. They crisp up really well and don't leave that film in your mouth like fast food fries do. Plus, the added bonus of no vegetable oils.
If you peel them before you cook them in salted water, they become a high-mid tier snack. I have tasted some shite potatoes too though (make sure they are waxy potatoes)
What's plain? You typically eat them together with other foods, perhaps most notably for potatoes meat juice from the meat you're eating. In English that's called "gravy" but that seems to imply doing various weird things to it. You don't eat a boiled potato all by itself.
That being said, if the potato doesn't taste good all by itself it's not a good potato.
When I was a kid my mom would make boiled new potatoes as a side dish for chicken or beef. Boiled veggies, too. Yes, we are English…
it's not bad at all. add a little ketchup and it's actually quite tasty.
'Since mass-produced potato products don’t use olive or other fruit oils, the answer is more specifically: Seed oils.'
You can find potato chips (purportedly) made with olive oil or avocado oil. Until recently, Boulder Canyon also made a version using coconut oil, which, sadly, they've discontinued. I even called them to confirm that when it disappeared from my grocery store.
This is leaving out what's been written about the difficulties of finding genuine, unadulterated olive oil (maybe avocado oil too).
Sad
I love Boulder Canyon potato chips for this reason but wonder if deep frying in olive oil is damaging in some other way even if it lowers seed oil levels.
I avoid mass produced foods for this reason. They always use those 'heart healthy' seeds oils. People have forgotten that cooking quality good food is easy and cheap. Yesterday I did beef stew for two, 500g organic beef, an onion & two carrots, pressure cooked with a bit of tallow for 30 mins - costing about £6 in the UK. Sit on a small amount of boiled potato to soak up the gravy. Stuffed.
I can hardly wait for interview of Dr Willett and Dr Norwitz to be available.
" aka seed oils, are also causative in obesity, then adjusting for BMI would be invalid, as one cannot adjust by a factor that is involved in the causative pathway. "
I'm glad you pointed that out, because I wasn't sure if I read that right.
Wonder if those numbers for meat account for the very common consumption of fries along with the meat. Would be interesting if you could get separate numbers for chicken fried in peanut oil (eg Chick Fil A, etc) - so often eaten in conjunction with those tasty waffle fries.
Apparently, American scientists are loath to study chicken consumption, likely because white meat is considered healthier than red meat. Purdue university researchers commented on the situation. (2023) “Poultry meats, in particular chicken, have high rates of consumption globally. Poultry is the most consumed type of meat in the United States (US), with chicken being the most common type of poultry consumed. The amounts of chicken and total poultry consumed in the US have more than tripled over the last six decades… Limited evidence from randomized controlled trials indicates the consumption of lean unprocessed chicken as a primary dietary protein source has either beneficial or neutral effects on body weight and body composition and risk factors for CVD and T2DM. Apparently, zero randomized controlled feeding trials have specifically assessed the effects of consuming processed chicken/poultry on these health outcomes.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10459134/
In a 2021 article entitled 'The under-appreciated fats of life' Australian Zoologist Anthony Hulbert, PhD concluded, "I note that we are only beginning to understand the implications of the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fats in the human diet... Over the last half-century, the modern human food chain has emphasised omega-6 and diminished omega-3 intake, largely because of: (i) a shift from animal fats to vegetable oils, (ii) an increase in grain-fed meat and dairy, and (iii) a decline in full-fat dairy products from grass-fed livestock (an important source of omega-3). In the opinion of the current author and others, these diet trends are likely to be responsible for the increased incidence of obesity and other modern epidemics of chronic disease,..." https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/224/8/jeb232538/256572/The-under-appreciated-fats-of-life-the-two-types
Excerpt from Page 56 of Hulbert's 2023 'Omega Balance' book. "The contribution of 'pork and poultry' to animal-sourced foods was 20 percent in 1961 and 41 percent in 2018…Between 1961 and 2018 there was a dramatic worldwide increase in the supply of fats from sources that have very low omega balances. Fat from 'pork and poultry' was greatest in North America for the entire 1961-2018 period, while for Australia and South America, the contribution from 'pork and poultry' was the World average level in 1961 and showed the greatest absolute increases (about 16 g) over this period to be similar to North America and Europe in 2018. There was negligible change in Africa over this period."
In 2020, a Siberian Federal University researcher commented on the change in the omega-3/6 balance of the food supply. “The dietary value of the Yakutian horse meat is very high precisely due to the ideal balance of polyunsaturated omega-3 and omega-6 acids, 1:1 ratio of these acids is ideal for us, but civilization is steadily shifting the balance towards the predominance of omega-6 due to the dominance of vegetable oils, cheap pork and fast food in our daily diet. We also need omega-6 acids, but in combination with the omega-3 partners, which are found mainly in fatty fish. The horse meat we tested is also very good, especially for child nutrition and the diet of people suffering from cardiovascular diseases. If the population of Yakutia starts consuming mass-market products, which are now imported abundantly into the republic, and makes a choice in favor of, let us say, semi-finished pork products, this may drastically affect people's health. This is just the case when you should not change a time-tested balanced diet,” concluded Olesia Makhmutova. https://www.sfu-kras.ru/en/news/23160
Of course, as anybody who folloows endocannabinoid system research knows, "Experimental and clinical intervention studies suggest that omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids have opposing physiological and metabolic properties and elicit divergent effects on body fat gain through mechanisms of adipogenesis, browning of adipose tissue, lipid homeostasis, systemic inflammation and an increase in the tone of the endocannabinoid system. Overweight and obese individuals have higher levels of the arachidonic acid (AA) derived endocannabinoid N-arachidonoylethanolamine (AEA) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) and an altered pattern of receptor expression. Since endocannabinoids are products of dietary fats, modification of the omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acid intake modulates the endocannabinoids, with eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) displacing AA from cell membranes, reducing AEA and 2-AG production, resulting in decrease in appetite and food intake leading to weight loss." https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full_html/2020/01/ocl190046s/ocl190046s.html
I may have missed something, but I'm confused as to why you chose to focus on seed oils rather than the fact that those two preparations of potato are fried in oil.
Surely that in itself is sufficient to explain the difference, without having to gesture towards vaguely conspiratorial explanations involving something that has been studied a lot and seems to be completely fine.
Always baffling how researchers seem to be completely unaware of what the results of their work shows and instead systematically choose to pander to some kind of narrative more often than not completely orthogonal to their studies. Is there pressure to conform to the standard "healthy" messages? Is it something social? Is there corruption? Are they just not that clever?
It's really puzzling. You cannot "just read the abstract" anymore.
Also in this study as in many others, sugars and weight gain seem to be fairly unrelated.
Brad Marshall's recent post talks about how people used to consume more than 100g of sugar a day in the 1950s... Another world is possible.
Excellent work, thank you!
EDIT: Just got to the part discussing funding... LOL!
I'm a seed-oil-disrespecter currently doing a SMTM potato riff, and while my trial isn't over i'm fairly confident already that any time I fry potatoes in coconut oil I defeat the benefits of the diet. I suspect i could become obese eating ad-lib potatoes that I fried myself in beef tallow. They're just so delicious there's no way to stop eating them until they're gone, and while the oil is still hot they're only 'gone' when I stop peeling and slicing the damn things.
Tldr; f**k seed oil fries yes, but even 'good' fries seem problematic.
1) Does it mean that the public health establishment is done with CICO model of obesity?
2) It puts paid to Taubes crusade against carbs as causative in obesity.
Both Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz failed to familiarize themselves with eicosanoid, endocannabinoid system, and arachidonic acid research. And, it's no wonder because there are no science writers anywhere in the World who write about this body of research. Consider this comment by Norwegian animal science researchers. "Eicosanoids are major players in the pathogenesis of several common diseases, with either overproduction or imbalance (e.g. between thromboxanes and prostacyclins) often leading to worsening of disease symptoms. Both the total rate of eicosanoid production and the balance between eicosanoids with opposite effects are strongly dependent on dietary factors, such as the daily intakes of various eicosanoid precursor fatty acids, and also on the intakes of several antioxidant nutrients including selenium and sulphur amino acids. Even though the underlying biochemical mechanisms have been thoroughly studied for more than 30 years, neither the agricultural sector nor medical practitioners have shown much interest in making practical use of the abundant high-quality research data now available."
As for arachidonic acid research, this 1996 comment puts things in perspective. "Excessive signaling of arachidonic acid (AA) metabolites has been associated with various chronic degenerative or autoimmune diseases, and intervention with the metabolism of AA is widely employed therapeutically in these afflictions. In essence, AA is the most biologically active unsaturated fatty acid in higher animals. Its concentration in membranes and its magnitude of effects depend on its amount, or that of its precursors and analogues, in the diet. The tendency of the field of nutrition to ignore the role of dietary AA will optimistically be reversed in the future." The article also said, "The underlying rationale for this symposium is that dietary AA is perhaps the single most important nutritional determinant in regulating AA levels in Americans. This may ultimately account in part for the striking differences in chronic diseases between strict vegetarians and the bulk of the omnivorous population." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022316622017333?via%3Dihub
Odd that the antics of Michael Jacobson's Center for Science in the Public Interest are not mentioned here. French fries were not always this bad. Decades ago, the CSPI succeeded in a crusade to get McDonald's to replace the beef tallow they had been frying them in with those wonderfully healthy natural vegetable oils - trans fats. :-) Subsequently they have hidden how they pushed them and other dangerous factory made substitutes for genuine natural products used for millennia, and write fictional accounts of the period, casting themselves as heroes.
Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but audacity.
Actually, it was Phil Sokolof who spearheaded the drive to reduce the saturated fat content of fast food. Sokolof was 43 when he sufferd a near fatal heart attack in 1966.
His cholesterol reportedly dropped from 300 to 150 after he reduced his saturated fat intake. He died from failure at age 82. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/us/phil-sokolof-82-a-crusader-against-cholesterol-is-dead.html
Is there any explanation as to why the fried foods category didn't have a larger impact? Those numbers at the bottom of that table are surprising.
It is possible that pork and poultry have a greater impact on insulin resistance than seed oils. We can't tell for certain because nobody has experimented with reduced monogastric meat intake in a structured weight loss trial. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(24)00179-7/fulltext
There is evidence that reducing arachidonic acid intake by adopting a Mediterranean style diet has a favorable impact on metabolic markers of health. "The Mediterranean diet is low in arachidonic acid and rich in healthy fats such as monounsaturated fats found in extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), nuts and omega-3 fatty acids from fish, which has been shown to lower the risk of inflammation, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity, and other degenerative diseases." https://advancedmolecularlabs.com/blogs/news/new-red-meat-study-controversy
Why would they remove the comment on the NEJM site?
When I did eat cereal for a snack I would always get crazy bloated. (a long time ago). Just Right, which is claimed to be for athletes but has the same amount of protein as all the other boxed junk next to it on the shelf.
Thanks for the detailed analysis.