Weekly servings of boiled, baked or mashed potatoes weren’t associated with an elevated risk of Type 2 diabetes — but french fries were.
Craving french fries? Dunking your spuds in a deep fryer might be a recipe for elevating your risk of Type 2 diabetes.
According to a study published Wednesday in the journal BMJ, swapping out your weekly dose of frites for boiled, baked or mashed potatoes could lower your risk of this chronic condition.
The authors examined the diets of more than 205,000 adults in the U.S. who responded to questionnaires about what they ate over nearly four decades. Among those who consumed potatoes, the authors looked at which people developed Type 2 diabetes, a disease that leads to persistently high blood sugar levels.
I haven’t read the study and obviously neither have you
One wants to think that in a study like this, researchers kept that in mind and ensures that those variables were accounted for.
I can’t vouch for any of that, but that is such a “step one” that it’d be really stupid if they hadn’t
The neat part about epidemiology is they can’t really control for healthy user bias - they can acknowledge it, then model a offset adjustment (assuming some uniform random variable with linear effect usually - so a regression to remove factors requires knowledge of their causal contribution which is “estimated” in the model…)… but yeah, the neat part is they don’t - which is why epidemiology can never prove causation.
neat