Eat a purple potato, and over the next eight hours the antioxidant capacity of your blood stream goes up. Purple potatoes can increase the antioxidant capacity of our bloodstream, whereas straight white potato starch can act as a pro-oxidant and decrease it. A half of a purple potato has about the same polyphenol antioxidant complement as a half cup of blueberries. This is comparable to what you might see in berries. If you compare the antioxidant activity of white potatoes, yellow potatoes, and purple potatoes, Yukon gold has about twice the antioxidant power as white, but purple has twenty times the antioxidants.
#Are sweet potatoes healthier than regular potatoes free#
Within hours of eating a large purple potato, you get a nice 60 percent bump in the antioxidant power of your bloodstream, and this translates into less free radical DNA damage. Pigmented potato consumption also alters oxidative stress.
If you randomize people to eat a small white potato every day for six weeks versus a yellow- or purple-fleshed potato, the purple potato group achieved significantly lower levels of inflammation compared to the white potato group, measuring both c-reactive protein and interleukin-6. The Potato Association of America likes to paint potatoes as an anti-inflammatory food, but what they don’t tell you is that this benefit may be limited to pigmented potatoes. If you were paying attention, you may have caught in the title as it flashed by that the purple potato pigments may also affect inflammation. The authors suggest purple potato extracts could be produced to make into supplements or fancy functional foods, but these health-promoting compounds may be more cost-effectively received from consuming purple potatoes themselves. This way, you don’t get that overshoot reaction where your blood sugars can actually drop below fasting like you might get otherwise instead, you get the gentler up and down in blood sugars you’d expect from a lower glycemic food. And lo and behold, compared to just plain yellow potatoes, you can get a suppression of the blood sugar and insulin spikes. In a test tube, extracts of purple- and red-fleshed potatoes can act as starch blockers so hey, if you can extract and purify out the purple potato pigments-say that five times fast-you could remove any other effects of the different potato varieties by adding the purple pigments to yellow potatoes.
How do we know it’s the pigments themselves that are responsible, rather than other differences between the different potato varieties? The researchers tried adding a control comprised of berries in a potato starch jelly, but that would seem to add even more variables. And not only do they look cool, but purple potatoes cause less of an insulin and blood sugar spike compared to even the yellow-fleshed potatoes, suggesting that switching from yellow or white to purple could have a large potential public health benefit. If you’ve never seen purple potatoes, they are remarkable they have almost a neon blue glow. No, I’m not saying you have to put blackberries in your baked potato, but given that the natural color compounds in fruits can slow down starch digestion, what about pigmented potatoes?Įven just yellow potatoes like Yukon gold may be preferable to white, but the best may be purple potatoes: not just purple-skinned potatoes, but purple- fleshed potatoes. So, if you’re going to eat a high glycemic food, you may be able to moderate its impact by spreading raspberries on your toast, for example, or adding strawberries to your cornflakes, or sprinkling blueberries in your pancakes. Well, if you remember, I had a video a few years back that showed how the pigments in brightly colored berries can act as starch blockers. In my last two videos, I explained how you can decrease the glycemic impact of white potatoes by eating them cold, or chilling then reheating them, or adding broccoli, lemon juice, or vinegar. The high glycemic impact of potatoes may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, perhaps by chronically overstimulating the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content.
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