Eat Potatoes THIS Way and They Won't Spike Your Blood Sugar | Dr. Neal Barnard

There is a good chance that somewhere along the way, someone told you the potato was the enemy. That if your blood sugar was high, the potato was one of the first things to go. So you gave it up, or you started feeling guilty every time one landed on your plate, and you feel like a person like you is simply not allowed to have anymore. I want to tell you that you were misled. Not lied to, exactly, but a much bigger truth. The potato was never your problem. What we do to the potato is the problem. And once you see the difference, this humble, inexpensive food goes from something you fear back to something you can put on your plate several times a week without watching your blood sugar climb. There is a right way to eat a potato, and it is not complicated. I am going to walk you through it. My name is Dr. Neil Barnard. I am a physician, and in 1985, I founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. I have spent a great deal of my career on one idea that still makes people uncomfortable, which is that carbohydrates, the very food so many of my patients were told to fear, are not the cause of type 2 diabetes, and that a diet built around whole plant foods can actually help bring blood sugar down. The potato sits right in the middle of that argument. So let me show you what it really does and how to eat it so it works for you instead of against you. Start with a fact that surprises almost everyone. When researchers set out, they tested dozens of them, and the single most filling food of them all was not chicken, not eggs, not a slice of hearty bread. Spoonful for spoonful than almost anything else they put in front of people. A food that fills you up on very few calories is not a food that was designed to hurt you. So why does it have such a bad reputation? Because of four things we do to it. Fix those four things, and the potato comes back to your table. Here is the first, and it is the one that does the most work. Number one, cook it, then cool it. This is the trick to magic on this whole list. When you cook a potato, the starch inside it opens up, soft and ready to be digested quickly, which is what sends blood sugar up. But when you then let that potato cool down in the refrigerator, something quietly remarkable happens. Starch begins to reform into a new, tighter structure that your body can no longer break down so easily. Scientists call it resistant starch, and the name tells you exactly what it does. It resists digestion. It behaves far more like fiber than like sugar. It is not fully broken down into glucose in the small intestine at all. Instead, a good portion of it travels further down, where it feeds the healthy bacteria in your gut, and it raises your blood sugar noticeably less than the very same potato would have, hot out of the oven. So a potato boiled today and eaten cold tomorrow in a potato salad made with a light dressing is gentler on your blood sugar than one eaten piping hot tonight. And here is the part people love. You do not have to eat it cold. You can gently reheat it, and much of that resistant starch stays put. So cook a batch, cool them in the fridge overnight, and use them through the week. That single habit changes the potato more than anything else you will hear today. Before I go on, hold onto that phrase, resistant starch, because it comes back at the end and ties this whole thing together. Now, number two. Number two, keep it whole. Shape matters more than you would think. The moment you mash a potato into a smooth puree, you have broken open all of those cells and made the starch inside the blood sugar up faster. A potato you eat in its own natural pieces, cubed or halved or simply whole, digests more slowly because your body has to do the work of breaking it down. And the skin is not a thing to peel away and throw out. That skin is where a good share of the fiber lives, and fiber is exactly what slows the whole process down. So a small, boiled potato eaten with its skin on is a very different food to your bloodstream than a mound of peeled, whipped, mashed potatoes. Same vegetable. Two completely different messages to your body. Now, I promised you that the potato was never the real problem, and here is where that becomes undeniable. Number three, look at what is riding on top of it. Think honestly about how a potato usually reaches you. It is deep oil that adds nothing but the kind of fat that harms you. Or it arrives, baked but buried, under a scoop of butter, a spoon of sourdough or of bacon. And then we blame the potato. But the potato underneath all of that did not change. What changed is that we poured saturated fat all over it and dropped it in a fryer. That fat is the trouble, and it also makes it harder for your body to handle the blood sugar from the meal. The potato took the blame for the company it was keeping. So here is what I tell my patients. Bake it or boil it, not fry it, and dress it with things that help rather than harm. A spoon of salsa, a little mustard, chopped chives and a squeeze of lemon, some steamed broccoli and a drizzle of good olive oil. You keep every bit of the comfort, and you lose the thing that was actually raising your numbers. Two ways down and two to go, and the last one is the smallest change of all. But it may be my favorite, because it costs you nothing. Number four, never send a potato in alone. It changes how that food hits your blood, and this is where you have real power. A plain potato eaten by itself will raise your blood sugar faster than the same potato eaten as part of a meal with beans next to it or lentils, which bring their own slow, steady fiber. Add a pile of greens or a real vegetable salad, and here is a small, almost old-fashioned trick with good science behind it. A little vinegar in a dressing on that salad genuinely blunts the rise in blood sugar that follows. The acid slows how fast the meal leaves your stomach. Dressing was doing something your grandmother never got the credit for. So the potato that comes with beans and greens and a splash of vinegar is a calmer, kinder meal than the potato standing alone on a plate. Now step back and look at the four together. They are one idea, told four ways. Cook it and cool it so the starch turns resistant. Keep it whole with the skin on so the fiber stays intact. Watch what you put on top, because that is where the real harm was hiding. And never send it in alone. And a meal that arrives slowly is a meal your blood sugar can handle. And here is the hopeful part, the reason I wanted to make this video at all. So much of the advice you have been given over the years has been a list of things to take away. Stop eating this, give up that. It is exhausting and it is often wrong. The truth about the potato is the opposite kind of advice. It is a food you were told to fear that you can very likely welcome back if you simply treat it with a little respect. The most filling food they ever tested, grown cheaply almost everywhere, sitting in your kitchen right now, is not the thing standing between you and a better blood sugar number. How we cook it and cover it was. So do not empty your pantry today. Do one thing, boil a few potatoes tonight, let them cool in the refrigerator overnight, and have them tomorrow with a little vinegar and something green. One small change, kept for a few weeks, teaches you more than any list of foods to fear ever could. If seeing the real reason behind advice like this is useful to you, consider subscribing. The next food everyone gets wrong is one I think you will want to hear about for the same reason. Your body was never as fragile as they told you. Treat your food with a little understanding and it will meet you halfway. I will see you in the next one.