The Secret Superfood of Thanksgiving

Summary

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the United States.If there’s one food you should overeat today, it’s probably potatoes. The humble potato is the original superfood, and you should consider eating more potatoes beyond Thanksgiving. This week’s 2% newsletter explains why.A Danish physician named Mikkel Hindhede proved you could survive on potatoes alone in the early 1900s. He had three laborers eat nothing but spuds 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: Eating mostly potatoes will keep a person strong and healthy. The Incans noticed this fact thousands of years earlier. Irish farmers experienced it in the 1800s. A recent study in the journal Nutrition discovered that the Aymara people of the Andes and Altiplano have ten times fewer incidences of pre-diabetes compared to Americans.“Potatoes are a surprisingly nutritionally complete food,” the nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., told me. The USDA reports that a medium potato contains about 170 calories, 5 grams of protein, 39 grams of carbs, and nearly every vitamin and mineral your body needs. Potatoes have more than double the potassium of a medium banana and a quarter the vitamin C of an orange.“Importantly, they 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.Potatoes contain more calories than most other vegetables. But this is actually a feature rather than a bug.They’re in a sweet spot where they can give us enough calories to survive (try surviving on broccoli and lettuce alone) but not so...