The healthiest Thanksgiving food

You should eat it year round.

Post summary

• The humble potato is the original superfood.

• Eat them on Thanksgiving and many more days after and you’ll be healthier.

• We’ll explain why potatoes are shockingly healthy, a top weight control food, excellent for fitness, and more.

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  • On Wednesday, we covered the power of rucking and walking meetings and 6 tips to make them successful. (Rucking meetings are insanely effective for improving health and endurance.)

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The post

If you’re going to overeat this Thanksgiving—and you are—here’s some advice: Lean into potatoes.

Potatoes may seem boring. But they’re actually the original superfood, and you should consider eating more of them year-round.

Today we’re covering why potatoes:

• Are shockingly healthy.

• Helped build civilizations.

• Are one of the best weight control foods.

• Are one of the most cost-effective health foods.

• Can fuel your workouts and build your fitness.

Let’s roll …

The science of the potatoes and health

Let’s say you had to select one natural food to eat for the rest of your life. Potatoes might be your best pick.

“Potatoes are a surprisingly nutritionally complete food,” the neuroscientist and nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., told me.

In the early 1900s, a Danish physician named Mikkel Hindhede proved you could live on potatoes. He had three laborers eat only potatoes with a dollop of margarine for 309 days.

Five doctors examined the men afterward and determined they were all in “excellent health.”

One participant was described as “a strong, solid, athletic-looking figure, all of whose muscles are well-developed, and without excess fat.”

Hindhede’s work gave scientific legitimacy to what other cultures had long known: A diet with many potatoes can keep a person strong and healthy.

The Incans noticed this fact thousands of years ago. Potatoes were their primary food.¹ Irish men and women until about 1845 ate anywhere from 9 to 15 pounds of potatoes daily and were healthy.

A recent study in the journal Nutrition discovered that the Aymara people of the Andes and Altiplano—who subsist mostly on potato varieties—have ten times fewer incidences of pre-diabetes than Americans.

The USDA reports that a medium potato contains about:

• 170 calories

• 5 grams of protein

• 39 grams of carbs

• Nearly every vitamin and mineral your body needs.

  • For example, potatoes have more than double the potassium of a medium banana, and one potato provides half of your daily vitamin C requirements.

  • Potatoes are also high in vitamin B, iron, and magnesium (a mineral 50% of Americans may need more of).

  • And then there’s the protein …

“Importantly, potatoes have complete protein, a distribution of essential amino acids that’s similar to animal proteins,” said Guyenet.

We don’t think of potatoes as “high protein.” But you could eat only potatoes and meet the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of protein.

Active and aging people are likely be better off getting more protein that the RDA, which is .36 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight.

The protein in potatoes highlights an important point: We often think grains and vegetables have no protein. But they actually add quite significantly to our daily protein intake, as I pointed out in my last appearance on Peter Attia’s Drive Podcast.

Yet potatoes aren’t entirely perfect—yes, you can survive on potatoes, but it’s not optimal in the long run.

Potatoes lack two vitamins: A and B12.

This is why that Dutch researcher in the early 1900s gave those five men margarine with their potatoes.

It’s also why most potato-dependent cultures eat them with a bit of greens or carrots and a small amount of animal products, like butter, milk, eggs, or meat. (Which suggests being a “meat and potatoes” person isn’t so bad after all.)

Potatoes are a powerful weight-control tool

Potatoes contain more calories than most other vegetables. But this is actually a feature rather than a bug.

Humans can’t survive on broccoli, lettuce, and most other vegetables alone because most vegetables don’t have enough calories. For example, you’d have to eat about 15 pounds of broccoli to get 2,500 calories, resulting in a sort of gastric apocalypse.

Potatoes, on the other hand, provide enough calories to fuel our work and movement but not so many that we overeat.²

This is because potatoes are the most filling food.

A study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the “satiety index”—a measurement of how full a food makes you feel—of common foods. They discovered that plain potatoes reign supreme.

Potatoes were 50 percent more filling than their nearest competitor, fish, and seven times more filling than croissants, which ranked dead last. The study suggests you’d have to eat seven croissants—roughly 1,200 calories—to experience the same fullness you’d get from one 170-calorie potato.

The takeaway: Potatoes are an ideal weight control food because you’ll feel fuller on enough calories—not too many, not too few—making you less likely to overeat.

You also might save money if you start eating more potatoes: They’re the cheapest vegetable.

Myths around potatoes and health

If you’ve heard that potatoes are unhealthy, know this: The problem isn’t the potatoes. The problem is us and what we do with potatoes.

We cut them into little sticks or paper-thin wafers, then bathe them in 365-degree oil (A third of America’s potatoes become french fries).

We boil them, then mash them with far too much butter and cream.³

“If you look at nonindustrial agricultural societies around the world who are lean and don’t have metabolic or cardiovascular disease, they don’t fry or pump up their carbs like potatoes with fats,” said Guyenet. “Most of their plate is a plain starch—whether it’s potatoes, rice, sweet potatoes, or cassava—and the rest is a smaller quantity of something more exciting, like a meat with sauce and vegetables.”

And if you’re worried about the carbs in potatoes, don’t be.

The weight of scientific evidence suggests that carbs don’t make you fat. Overeating carb (or fat or protein) does. And that, as the food satiety index study found, is hard to do with plain old potatoes.

Potatoes as fitness fuel

For fueling workouts, potatoes are a weird but effective option.

That’s thanks to their relatively high carb content, minerals, and amino acid profile. I once spoke with a professional ultrarunner who runs with a plastic bag of salty mashed potatoes.

When he needs mid-run fuel, he’ll bite a corner from the bag and squeeze the potatoes into his mouth, like an endurance goo. Except the mashed potatoes are minimally processed and packed with naturally occurring electrolytes. Commercial endurance goos, on the other hand, are akin to toxic sugar sludge and taste similarly.

So enjoy potatoes this Thanksgiving day—and hopefully more days this year.

Get creative with them—boil them, bake them⁴, air fry them, mash them, microwave them. And once they’re cooked, take it easy on the butter, sour cream, cheese, oils, and all the other ingredients that can make good potatoes go bad.

Growing up, I’d always heard of basic, unexciting men referred to as “a ‘meat and potatoes’ kind of guy.”

But the more I learn about potatoes, the more I’m OK with that designation. Because if I just throw some greens or carrots into the mix, I’ll be perfect.

Have fun, don’t die, eat potatoes.

-Michael

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1. The ancestors of the Incans, FWIW, gave the world potatoes. Ancient potatoes contained high levels of glycoalkaloids, which can cause gastrointestinal issues. The people cleverly watched which potatoes birds were eating, suggesting lower glycoalkaloids, and used those for breeding.

2. For example, in the 1600s, Europe used potatoes to feed the masses and combat famine. That’s because, as my friend Ferris Jabr wrote:

Potatoes were easy to sow and harvest, as well as inherently more productive than grains: wheat, rice, corn and barley could only grow so tall and heavy before they fell over; nestled in the ground, tubers could swell to impressive sizes, yielding two to four times more calories per acre.

3. For the record, I’m 100% on board with some butter and cream in my Thanksgiving potatoes … but consider taking it easy on that stuff after the holiday.

4. A baked russet potato with sour cream is one of my favorite foods. Especially the oversized variety you find accompanied by fatty slabs of prime rib served in Western saloons or smoky casino diners in small gambling towns. The two best baked potatoes in the country, for what it’s worth, are found at the Pioneer Saloon in Ketchum, Idaho, and the Virgin River Hotel and Casino River Café in Mesquite, Nevada.