REAL INFORMATION: Potato is the No.1 food that drives weightgain

By SOLA OGUNDIPE

IF you want to lose weight, the last food you
should be eating are potatoes. Sounds odd,
but an intriguing discovery by a team of
Havard researchers is that potatoes, especially
the fried variety, is the No.1 food that drives
weight gain.

According to the study, small changes in
lifestyle behaviours such as physical activity,
sleep duration, and TV-watching are strongly
correlated with long-term weight gain.
But the most important factor was diet—and
among the report's most intriguing findings is
precisely how much weight gain (or loss) can
be attributed to consuming an additional daily
serving of a variety of specific foods over a
four-year period.
The long-term impacts of small but significant
lifestyle changes—especially to diet were
emphasised.

In a new report published in The New England
Journal of Medicine, a team of Harvard
researchers has revealed the results of a study
of 120,877 people showing that 10 foods were
found to be especially correlated with long-
term changes in weight.

Among foods promoting weight gain, potato
chips topped the list. The researchers'
conclusion was that potatoes and extra kilos
go together, so anyone seeking to shed weight
should steer clear French fries and every other
variety of the "spuds".
From the study, a daily extra serving of
potatoes, whether, boiled, fried, baked or
mashed, could add up to five kilos over the
course of four years.

An additional serving of nuts, fruit or
vegetables, on the other hand, will add up to
weight loss. The scientists noted in their
results that potatoes are very calorie dense,
noting that it is best to cook potatoes so that
the starchy goodness can be converted into
glucose.

A medium sized pack of potato chips contains
about 300 calories, 15 grammes of fat and 45
grammes of carbohydrates. Even the relatively
medium baked potato has about 160 calories,
less than a gramme of fat and and about 37
grammes of carbohydrates.

According to the research, potato is not
exactly diet ood to begin with. Nuts are far
more diet friendly.
In a related study, researchers evaluated three
large cohorts of people who were free of
chronic diseases and not obese at the start of
the evaluation process. They measured
specific lifestyle factors and weight gain every
four years, with follow-up times ranging from
12 to 20 years.
One striking if somewhat predictable takeaway
from the study is that focusing on overall
dietary quality- such as eating less refined
sugars and refined grains and more minimally
processed foods - is probably more important
to long-term health than monitoring total
calorie or fat intake or other nutritional
markers. Nutritionists say the idea that there
are no "good" or "bad" foods is a myth that
needs to be debunked.