Eating potatoes increases the risk of high blood pressure, but there is a silver lining – crisps are an exception.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School looked into how potatoes really affect our health.

Turns out, if you have four or more servings a week of baked, boiled or mashed potatoes, you’re 11 per cent more likely to get high blood pressure.

If you have the same number of servings of chips (or ‘fries’ for any Americans reading this), the risk is 17 per cent higher.

But – hoorah! – eating the good old humble crisp had no effect, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal.

Researchers studied data from more than 187,000 men and women from three large US studies over the last 20 years.

And the crisp exception held true even when the team took the weight of participants into account.

Apparently, all you have to do is replace one of your potato servings a day with a serving of non-starchy vegetables, and your risk of getting high blood pressure will drop by around seven per cent.

Researchers reckon it could be down to the high glycaemic index (GI) of potatoes. High GI foods release energy more quickly, and raise blood sugar more quickly as a result.

High GI meals have been associated with dysfunction of cells in the body, oxidative stress and inflammation – which, the research team said, are all ‘potentially important mechanisms in the development of hypertension (high blood pressure)’.

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Ashitha Nagesh

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