To lose weight, some health experts say you need to avoid “bad carbs,” such as baked potatoes.
However, new research is challenging this claim, now reported in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. Their findings reveal that people who eat potatoes as part of a calorie-controlled diet still lose weight–shattering the myth that what you eat matters more than how much you eat.
“Some people have questioned the role of potatoes in a weight loss regimen because of the vegetable’s designation as a high glycemic index food,” says Dr. Britt Burton-Freeman, Ph.D., lead investigator of the study and an Associate Professor of Food Science and Nutrition at the Illinois Institute of Technology School of Applied Technology. “However, the results of this study confirm what health professionals and nutrition experts have said for years: it is not about eliminating a certain food or food groups, rather, it is reducing calories that count.”
In recent years, health experts have believed that how food spikes your blood glucose affects how fast you lose weight–arranged into a system called the glycemic index. The more foods spike your blood glucose, the higher their ranking, and the more likely they’ll make you gain weight, something dieters obviously don’t want. Potatoes have been notorious for being a high-glycemic food–but researchers set out to test out if this was actually the case.
Recruiting a group of 90 overweight men and women, researchers did just that. Split into three groups, participants were assigned one of three diets: A high-GI diet, a low-GI diet, or a diet with no GI restrictions. All groups also ate up to seven servings of potatoes per week, which they continued to eat for a total of 12 weeks. Then, after the study period, researchers looked at how lost the most weight, and found something surprising: All three groups lost the same amount of weight, regardless of what they ate.
This, to researchers, proves that high-GI foods, including potatoes, may not necessarily affect a person’s weight.
“There is no evidence that potatoes, when prepared in a healthful manner, contribute to weight gain,” says Burton-Freeman. “In fact, we are seeing that they can be part of a weight loss program.”
Bottom line? If you love potatoes, don’t sweat it–eating them on a regular basis won’t make it harder to lose weight.
What You Should Do
To lose weight, what matters more is how much you eat–and not necessarily what you eat. Focus more on your caloric intake instead to speed up your weight loss, say health experts.
Readers: Do you follow the glycemic index to lose weight?
Sources:
Lose the Calories, Not the Potatoes: High-GI Foods Won’t Affect Your Weight, Study Says – ScienceDaily.com
To Lose Weight, Focus on Calories, Not What You Eat, According to New Study – AlphaGalileo.org
Potatoes, Glycemic Index, and Weight Loss in Free-Living Individuals: Practical Implications – Tandfonline.com
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