Small choices with cooking can help shape big health outcomes

The butterfly effect is a story written to explain how minor changes in one place can have massive effect in another place. Whilst in our day to day we cannot feel the small differences it doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.

- Dr Ali A Smith

They can take a long time to play out. Rather longer than any human tends to consider or monitor for effects.

A version of that story might reasonably include potatoes. How we eat our potatoes turns out to be important. Unlike much of the world, potatoes make up a very large proportion of the energy intake of peoples diet in this country.

Some people have taken a view that all potatoes are bad because they have lots of energy and not much else. But that's not fair. Potatoes can be healthy. They provide mostly carbohydrate. It comes as starch, a sort of difficult to break down form of sugar.

A large study of how people eat potatoes was published recently and it tells us that potatoes can be good or bad depending on how you cook them.

If for instance you like mash with your sausages, that works out fine.

The same is true for a baked potato. Boiled potatoes with your salad is great. The problem is chips. Potato in the form of chips is associated with the development of type 2 diabetes. Just chips. Otherwise potatoes are fine.