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 nobody has repeated it properly 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.
The short answer: A plain potato is the most filling food in the only study that ever ranked them properly, at about 350 calories a pound against 2,500 for crisps. Cook it, then let it go cold before you eat it, and some of its starch turns into fibre your gut bacteria live on.
The honest caveat: the white potato sits at the bottom of the starch hierarchy, below sweet potatoes, beans and intact grains, and there is real observational data behind that. What is doing the damage in most diets is not the potato. It is the fryer.
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 fibre, 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 crisps carries about 2,500, from the same plant.
And fat does not register with your appetite the way bulk and starch do, 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 most of one croissant.
What a potato is not. It is not a nutritional powerhouse and we are not going to claim otherwise. On nutrient density per calorie the baked white potato scores 43 and brown rice 41, so nutritionally they are the same food. A sweet potato scores 83, about double. Worth switching for, not a different category of food. Eat potatoes because they fill you up cheaply, not because they are packed with vitamins. The greens on the side are doing that job.
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 fibre, not like starch.
Two things follow. The blood sugar response from that same potato is lower. The calorie change is smaller than you would guess. Food labelling counts resistant starch at 2 calories a gram against 4 for ordinary starch, and when researchers measured it directly in a metabolic chamber it came out gentler still, around 2.7.
Cooling a large potato adds roughly 8 grams of resistant starch, which is fifteen or twenty calories off a two hundred calorie potato. 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 does not undo it. The change is physical, in the starch crystal, and the international glycaemic index tables list a boiled potato that was refrigerated and then reheated at 23, against 76 for the same potato eaten fresh. Cold in a salad is simplest. Warmed up the next day still counts.
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 per cent higher risk of type 2 diabetes for each daily serving of potatoes, with the association strongest in the women who were obese. The glycaemic load of the potato itself was implicated, not butter or oil added to it.
- The North Carolina Colon Cancer Study compared 945 rectal cancer cases with 959 controls. Among the white participants it found 57 per cent more rectal cancer in people eating three potatoes a week than one, 83 per cent at nearly six a week, and more than double at nine. Among the African American participants in the same study it found nothing at all, and the trend there was flat.
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 per cent 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 crisps, and food questionnaires often cannot tell them apart. Populations built on potatoes, in the Andes and in highland Papua New Guinea, did not show these patterns.
Those are real mitigations. They are not a dismissal, and pretending the data does not exist would be the easy thing to do here.
Venny: Where this lands clinically is a hierarchy, not a ban. Starch belongs at the centre of the plate, and within starches the white potato is the weakest option. If you are carrying extra weight or managing blood sugar, sweet potatoes, beans, lentils and intact grains should come first, and potatoes become the sometimes food rather than the daily one.
If you are hungry, active and at a comfortable weight, the potato is the most filling thing you can put on a plate. Both of those are true at the same time.
What about the glycaemic 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 fat, which slows digestion, and fat is not the ingredient you want more of.
Blood sugar rising after a meal is the system working. That is what eating is for. The question is what happens over years, and the populations whose diets were built on starch, in the Andes and in highland Papua New Guinea, did not show these patterns.
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 per cent of all the vegetables Americans eat are white potatoes, and a large share of that is fries and crisps. 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. It raises cancer risk whether the food is animal or plant, because it makes acrylamide in starchy food. One estimate puts the excess lifetime cancer risk attributable to french fry consumption in young children as high as one or two in ten thousand.
A boiled potato is not a crisp. They are not the same food and they should never share a sentence without that being said.
Andy: There is a study I think about whenever someone tells me they lack willpower. Offer people a lunch menu of fries, chicken nuggets or a baked potato, and among those who score high on self-control roughly one in ten takes the fries. Add a side salad to the same menu, changing nothing else, and fries roughly triple, to about a third.
The presence of a virtuous option seems to license the indulgent one, and the effect was strongest in exactly the people who believe they have this handled. So the useful move is not to try harder in the moment. It is to decide what is in the house on Saturday, when you are not hungry and nothing is at stake.
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.
| Type | Examples | Behaviour | Use for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waxy | Small red, new potatoes, Charlotte, Nicola. Yukon gold sits in between and works for both | Less starch, more moisture. Holds its shape when cooked | Potato salad, skillet dishes, anything sliced or cubed |
| Floury | Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper | More starch, drier. Falls apart and goes fluffy | Wedges, baking whole, thickening a soup |
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 realise, because the skin carries close to ten times the antioxidants of the flesh. And go gently on them: baking destroys most of the peel’s antioxidants and about 80 per cent of the vitamin A, roughly twice what boiling costs. Steaming is better than either, because nothing leaches into the water.
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 per cent and diastolic about 4.3 per cent, 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.
- Steaming. Our default. Fifteen minutes for cubes, and it keeps more in the potato than boiling does.
- Boiling. Fine, and the losses are modest so long as you keep the water 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 dietitian; Andy is a psychologist. This is general information rather than medical advice.
Where to Start With Potatoes
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.
