Potatoes: The Most Filling of 38 Foods Tested, and the Case Against Them

In 1995 a group of Australian researchers fed people 240 calories of each of 38 different foods and then measured how hungry they were for the next two hours.

White bread was set at 100. Croissants came in at 47. Fish, which people think of as filling, reached 225.

Where the potato landed

The plain boiled potato scored 323. It beat everything else on the list, including every animal food tested, and it was not close. It was a small study, 11 to 13 people per food, and no one has repeated the full ranking since. It is still the only ranking of its kind we have.

Which sits oddly beside the potato’s reputation. So this page does both halves: what the potato is genuinely good at, and the objections that deserve a straight answer rather than a defensive one.

Why Potatoes Fill You Up More Than Anything Else

Two things are happening, and neither is mysterious.

A potato is mostly water and starch wrapped in fiber, so it takes up a lot of room in your stomach for very few calories. A pound of potatoes carries roughly 350 calories. A pound of potato chips carries about 2,500, from the same plant.

And in that study, the fattier the food, the less filling it was, which is why a meal can be enormous in calories and still leave you looking in the fridge.

Put those together and you get the 1995 result. Two hundred and forty calories of boiled potato is roughly two-thirds of a pound of food. Two hundred and forty calories of croissant is about one croissant.

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Cook Your Potatoes, Then Let Them Go Cold

This is the one instruction on this page that changes the food itself, and almost nobody does it deliberately.

When you cook a starch and then cool it, the starch molecules rearrange into a tighter structure. The process is called retrogradation, and the result is resistant starch: starch your small intestine can no longer break down.

It travels on to your large intestine instead, where your bacteria ferment it. So it behaves like fiber, not like starch.

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Two things follow. The blood sugar response from that same potato is lower. The calorie change is smaller than you would guess. Ordinary starch carries 4 calories a gram. When researchers measured a resistant starch directly in a metabolic chamber, it still delivered about 2.7 to 3.

Cooling a large potato adds somewhere between about 1 and 8 grams of resistant starch, depending on how it is measured. That is a few calories off a two hundred calorie potato, ten at most. The blood sugar effect is the real one. The calorie saving is a footnote.

Potato salad, it turns out, was ahead of us. Our no-mayo potato salad tells you to steam the potatoes and set them aside to cool, and until now the recipe never said why.

The same chemistry is why a flourless loaf has to cool before you cut it. Different food, identical mechanism, and we explain it properly in the bread guide.

Reheating keeps some of the benefit in some potatoes, but reheated potatoes hold less resistant starch than cold ones, and results vary by variety. Cold in a salad is the reliable version.

The Case Against Potatoes, Taken Seriously

This is where most plant-based writing goes quiet, and we would rather not.

There are two findings that a fair reading has to include:

• The Nurses’ Health Study followed 84,555 women for twenty years and found an 18 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes for each daily serving of potatoes, with the association strongest in the women who were obese.
• The North Carolina Colon Cancer Study compared 945 rectal cancer cases with 959 controls. Among the white participants it found 57 percent higher odds of rectal cancer at about three servings of potatoes a week than at one, 83 percent at nearly six, and about two and a half times at nine. Among the African American participants in the same study it found nothing at all, and the trend there was flat.

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Both are observational, which means they show association and not cause. And the diabetes question has since been asked again, much larger. In 2025 the same group went back to three cohorts, 205,107 people and 22,299 cases, and the picture split in two: french fries carried a 20 percent higher risk per three servings a week, while baked, boiled and mashed potatoes carried no measurable risk at all.

In American dietary data “potato” is heavily fries and potato chips, which is exactly why the newer study split the fries out, and why the answer changed when it did.

Those are real mitigations. They are not a dismissal, and pretending the data does not exist would be the easy thing to do here.

What about the glycemic index?

There is no single number for a boiled potato. The international tables run from 56 for a waxy Marfona to 118 for a Sava, averaging around 82, and the waxy potatoes this page tells you to buy sit at the bottom of that range. Meanwhile supreme pizza scores about 30, chocolate cake 38, premium ice cream 37.

Any measurement that ranks ice cream above a potato is measuring the wrong thing. What lowers those numbers is mostly fat and protein, which slow digestion. Cheddar on a baked potato brought its index down to 39, and that is not a reason to add cheese.

Blood sugar rising after a meal is the system working. That is what eating is for. The question is what happens over years, and there the fryer, not the boiled potato, is where the data points.

If you are on medication for diabetes or blood pressure, changes to how you eat can move your numbers quickly and your prescription may need to move with them. That is a conversation to have with your own doctor rather than with a website.

The Fryer Is the Problem, Not the Potato

Roughly 30 percent of the vegetables in the American food supply are white potatoes, and about two-thirds of the potato supply goes to fries, chips and other processed products. When a study finds potatoes associated with something bad, that is usually the food it is describing.

Deep-frying is its own category of problem. Deep-fried foods, plant or animal, have been linked with prostate cancer in observational research, and frying starchy food makes acrylamide.

A boiled potato is not a crisp. They are not the same food and they should never share a sentence without that being said.

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Which Potato to Buy, and Whether to Peel It

Our recipes keep telling you to use waxy potatoes without ever explaining what that means. Here is the difference, because it decides whether your dish works.

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Use a floury potato in a potato salad and you get mush. That is the single most common potato mistake and it is a shopping mistake, not a cooking one.

Leave the skin on

Almost all of our recipes leave it on, and only one asks you to peel. Scrub it, do not peel it, and cut away anything green.

With sweet potatoes this matters more than most people realize, because the skin carries several times the antioxidants of the flesh, up to ten times in one study. And go gently on them: in the same study, baking cut the skin’s phenolic antioxidants by about 55 percent, against 37 percent for boiling.

A note on purple potatoes

If you see them, buy them. In one small crossover trial, eighteen people with high blood pressure ate six to eight small purple potatoes twice a day, microwaved, for four weeks. Systolic pressure fell about 3.5 percent and diastolic about 4.3 percent, in people mostly already on medication, with no weight gain. It is a small study and it is a lot of potatoes, but it is not something an ordinary white potato has been shown to do.

How to Cook Potatoes Without Ruining Them

Ranked roughly by how gently they treat the potato.

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• Steaming. Our default. Fifteen minutes for cubes, and nothing sits in water.
• Boiling. Fine. Some of what leaves the potato ends up in the water, so keep it and use it as stock.
• Baking whole. Forty to fifty minutes at 400°F, pricked with a fork. The least work of anything here.
• Roasting in pieces. Thirty to forty minutes at 400°F on parchment. Browning is where acrylamide forms, so we stop at golden, not dark.
• Frying. We do not.

The mistake that ruins potato salad

Overcooking. As our potato salad recipe puts it, they should be tender and still slightly firm, because past that point they fall apart when you stir them.

Test with a fork at ten minutes, not fifteen. You can always give them two minutes more.

Getting seasoning to stick without oil

Halve them, then press the cut face down into a bowl of dry spices. The damp surface picks up far more than tossing does. Mustard smeared thinly works too.

There is more of this in our guide to cooking without oil.

Potato Recipes Worth Starting With

• Creamy Garlic Potatoes in a Skillet: steamed, then folded through a tahini sauce. The most-read potato recipe we have.
• Oil-free Roasted Potatoes: the press-into-the-spices method.
• Baked Mustard Wedges: what to make when somebody wants chips.
• Potato Salad, No Mayo: cooled deliberately, which is the resistant starch trick in practice.
• Creamy Potato Salad: the richer version, and the one that teaches you not to overcook.
• Creamy Kale Potato Soup: half of it blended, so it thickens itself.
• Bean Stuffed Sweet Potatoes: the easiest dinner on this list.
• Sweet Potato Lentil Curry: one pot, and it improves overnight.
• Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burgers: boiled, mashed and baked into patties.

Venny is a medical doctor and a specialist in Nutrition and Dietetics; Andy holds a master’s degree in psychology. This is general information rather than medical advice.

Where to Start With Potatoes

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Steam a pan of waxy potatoes tonight and put half in the fridge.

Eat those cold tomorrow in a salad. That is the whole resistant starch idea, and it costs you nothing except deciding to do it a day early.

And, always, seek health consciously.

Read Next

• Cooking Without Oil: What Actually Replaces It
• Bread Without Flour: How It Works, and Which Loaf to Make
• The Four Numbers That Make Plant Food Filling