Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable–But You're Eating Them Wrong
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I also have a giant compost pile consisting of mostly wood shavings and horse manure that I planted about a dozen potatoes into as an experiment, along with a couple dozen carrots. So far they seem to be doing really well.
I would leave the skin on on so called early potatoes that have really thin skin. And I am using a Victorinox peeler that produces the thinnest peels for me. https://schweizer-messer.eu/victorinox-sparschaeler/ (others in the family won't use it due to the crank, though)
1: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/potatoes#nutritio...
2: https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-green-potatoes-dangerous
Concerning the potatoes there's some kind of preservative they put on the potatoes to inhibit germination (on non-organic potatoes). They used Chlorpropham but that seems to be prohibited since 2020 (in the EU?), now they use Maleic hydrazide but I don't know about any health issues.
The skins are easily the tastiest part. It's an absolute tragedy that people think you need to peel them, especially for french fries.
Even with mashed potatoes, I leave the skins on. I just dice them into small pieces before boiling so there aren't huge skin chunks.
I see what you did there lol
Least satiating food are croissants, 7x less than potatoes
Also based on that list, I think salsa might be the perfect mix: low cal and high satiety
I want more research into the concept of calories. I only recently learned that our understanding of how to measure food energy is rather primitive.
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 <3
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.
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
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.
My vote for biggest food bastard is Sushi. That sugary rice inevitably sends me to the moon (and crashing back to earth a few hours later…)
Eating carbohydrates cannot cause Diabetic Ketoacidosis.
Ketoacidosis is caused by not having enough insulin which means glucose can't exit your bloodstream and enter your cells, Your body starts breaking down fat into ketones to provide an energy pathway for your cells that doesn't require insulin. Ketones are acidic and at high enough levels will cause DKA. This can be fatal.
Eating potatoes without corresponding insulin will raise the level of glucose in your bloodstream to high levels. This is not immediately fatal. Having a high average blood glucose level over a long time span (years) will lead to lots of complications including nerve damage, kidney damage, blindness, etc. Obviously this assumes you have the appropriate basal rate of insulin which is separate from eating.
A more accurate way of making your point is that it is difficult to match insulin response times (even with modern fast acting insulin) to certain foods that are absorbed quickly, so eating potatoes may cause a time period may cause a higher post prandial glucose level. The goal of type 1 diabetic therapy is to keep your average glucose levels as close to a normal person's level as possible. So avoiding certain foods (or eating along with protein/fat/fiber) can help achieve lower average blood glucose levels.