Economist Writing Every Day

Several people have tried eating an all-potato diet for a few weeks and reported losing lots of weight with little hunger or effort. Could this be the best diet out there? Or are we only hearing from the rare success stories, while all the people who tried it and failed stay quiet?

Right now we don’t really know, but the people behind the Slime Mold Time Mold blog are trying to find out:

Tl;dr, we’re looking for people to volunteer to eat nothing but potatoes (and a small amount of oil & seasoning) for at least four weeks, and to share their data so we can do an analysis. You can sign up below.

I was surprised to see that they are the ones running this, since they are best known for the “Chemical Hunger” series arguing that the obesity epidemic is largely driven by environmental contaminants like Lithium. The conclusion of that series noted:

Bestselling nutrition books usually have this part where they tell you what you should do differently to lose weight and stay lean. Many of you are probably looking forward to us making a recommendation like this. We hate to buck the trend, but we don’t think there’s much you can do to keep from becoming obese, and not much you can do to drop pounds if you’re already overweight. 

We gotta emphasize just how pervasive the obesity epidemic really is. Some people do lose lots of weight on occasion, it’s true, but in pretty much every group of people everywhere in the world, obesity rates just go up, up, up. We’ll return to our favorite quote from The Lancet: 

“Unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

That said, they did still offer some advice based on the contaminant theory that is consistent with the potato diet:

1. — The first thing you should consider is eating more whole foods and/or avoiding highly processed foods. This is pretty standard health advice — we think it’s relevant because it seems pretty clear that food products tend to pick up more contaminants with every step of transportation, packaging, and processing, so eating local, unpackaged, and unprocessed foods should reduce your exposure to most contaminants. 

2. — The second thing you can do is try to eat fewer animal products. Vegetarians and vegans do seem to be slightly leaner than average, but the real reason we recommend this is that we expect many contaminants will bioaccumulate, and so it’s likely that whatever the contaminant, animal products will generally contain more than plants will. So this may not help, but it’s a good bet. 

Overall though I think the idea here is to ignore grand theories and take an empirical approach. The potato diet works surprisingly well anecdotally, so lets just see if it can work on a larger scale. Seems worth a try; I’m sure plenty of my ancestors in Ireland and Northern Maine did 4-week mostly-potato diets and lived to tell about it. You can read more and/or sign up here. Let us know how it goes if you actually try it!