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Government Science

US Diet Committee Debates Whether Potatoes are Vegetables or 'Starchy Grain' (msn.com) 129

Posted by EditorDavid from the I-yam-what-I-yam dept.
Every five years America's federal Department of Health updates its dietary guidelines with the latest nutrition science, affecting federal nutrition programs and various other government health initiatives.

Now an anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Botanists count potatoes as a vegetable. But should Americans? The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has sparked the question... White potatoes, which come in various colors, are classified as "starchy vegetables." But the committee could uproot potatoes from the vegetable bin and toss them in with a broader category of rice, other grains and carbohydrates as the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services weigh updates to national diet guidelines for 2025.

The scientific debate isn't easy to follow. But it sounds like a half-baked idea to Kam Quarles, chief executive of the National Potato Council, a potato-industry group. The dietary guidelines shape nutrition advice to Americans, as well as what foods are served in school cafeterias. Potatoes, according to Quarles, should be respected as a gateway vegetable. "Kids are far more likely to eat" dishes with other vegetables if potatoes are involved, he said.

Not all parents swallow that a trail of tubers leads to leafy greens. Some complained about a Peppa Pig animated cartoon that featured a potato preaching the nutritional value of vegetables. "By the power of vegetables, I am here," Super Potato said, soaring through the sky, singing, "Fruit and vegetables keep us alive. Always remember to eat your five." The U.K.'s National Health Service, for one, doesn't count spuds toward the U.K.'s recommended five portions of fruits and vegetables a day. "It's a giant spud singing it. You're, like, 'Really? A potato's one of your five a day?'" said Dan Greef, the owner of Deliciously Guilt Free, a sugar-free bakery in Cambridge, U.K. He spent years persuading his two children to eat vegetables. Then, he said, "a drawing of a potato tells you it's fine, and you don't listen to your dad...."

Nutrition researchers say the potato contains helpful nutrients, including potassium and vitamin C, but its health benefits are diminished when it is fried. Nearly half of all U.S. potatoes eaten as food go into frozen products, mostly french fries, the USDA found.
For comparison, the article points out that under U.S. dietary guidelines, "corn on the cob is a starchy vegetable, while cornmeal is a grain."
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US Diet Committee Debates Whether Potatoes are Vegetables or 'Starchy Grain' More

US Diet Committee Debates Whether Potatoes are Vegetables or 'Starchy Grain'

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  • Pandering to idiots leads to idiocy (Score:3, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday December 10, 2023 @01:44PM (#64070859) Homepage Journal

    We give these definitions because we want things to be understandable to stupid people. But most of those people could know better, if they were better educated. Wouldn't it be smarter (in every way) to educate people sufficiently to understand that not all vegetables are created equal than to try to define a potato as not being one? Any plant or part of a plant used as food is a vegetable by definition.

    • We give these definitions because we want things to be understandable to stupid people. But most of those people could know better, if they were better educated. Wouldn't it be smarter (in every way) to educate people sufficiently to understand that not all vegetables are created equal than to try to define a potato as not being one? Any plant or part of a plant used as food is a vegetable by definition.

      Complexity is what clever people use to trick themselves.

    • Definitions because it's diet, not botany. Thus multiple words for the same things in some areas, or the same name for different things in others. So when soemone says "eat your vegetables, they're good for you", they don't mean peyote. But potatos are in the middle and always confusing (even how to spell potatoes). A food item that's a plant, but it's also like wheat or rice - these are "carbs" but you need more calories in a healthy diet from other sorts of vegetables too, leafy greens, squashes, legu

      • For the same reason, fruits and vegetables have different meanings in science.

        Oh, like tomatoes then.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          Just like raspberries and strawberries are not botanically "berries", because it does not develop from the flower's ovaries. Bananas and cucumbers on the other hand are berries. So is the fruit from which we obtain coffee "beans", which are not beans.

        • For the same reason, fruits and vegetables have different meanings in science.

          Oh, like tomatoes then.

          As I noted elsewhere [slashdot.org], that's due more to a tariff issue, at least in the US.

          • Interesting, thanks. It is well known that American legal definitions and scientific definitions are not the same, and that is certainly not confined to America either. Thankfully when I put ketchup on my fries I don't really care what any of them think.

        • Yep. tomatoes are generally better for you than most fruits, it's closer to vegetables nutrition wise. So for diet purposes, it's a vegetable. Potatoes are the opposite. Despite being a lot like a carrot, it's more starch/carbs than most vegetables, ergo, it ends up in the "starches" category for a lot of people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        A food item that's a plant, but it's also like wheat or rice - these are "carbs" but you need more calories in a healthy diet from other sorts of vegetables too, leafy greens, squashes, legumes, etc.

        Pretty much all root vegetables are starches. It's a slippery slope all the way to carrots if you start drawing arbitrary lines.

    • Re:Pandering to idiots leads to idiocy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @02:01PM (#64070925)

      Potatoes kept whole civilizations alive. You have to be a very extreme idiot to start worrying about how to classify a potato.

      • Indeed, I would invite our Irish readers to weigh in!

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by geekmux ( 1040042 )

        Potatoes kept whole civilizations alive. You have to be a very extreme idiot to start worrying about how to classify a potato.

        But..but...we have to have something to blame for the obesity epidemic.

        It certainly can't be some human's fault.

      • Sure, potatoes kept whole civilizations alive - until there were extensive crop failures, then a lot of people starved.

        But I'd argue that the very importance of potatoes as a part of people's diet for much of the world makes "worrying how to classify" them just that much more important.

        Especially when the decision will affect things like school lunch programs.

      • Potatoes kept whole civilizations alive. You have to be a very extreme idiot to start worrying about how to classify a potato.

        Those civilisations hadn't invented freeze driers, or deep friers yet. There's many ways to eat a potato, and the way most Americans do (and to be fair Belgians too) is not helping keep them alive.

        • > Those civilisations hadn't invented freeze driers

          The Inca empire would like a word... Yes, they had a natural freeze drier in the form of the Andes, but still, they learned to use it.
          I'd like to recommend a book: Lost Crops of the Incas ( https://nap.nationalacademies.... [nationalacademies.org] )

      • Or, you know, a nutritional scientist. But sure, an expert who spent over a decade studying how the human body reacts to certain foodstuffs in it's diet, I mean, what do they know?

        Pffft, experts. What are they good for. That's why I told off that poison control expert when they said I shouldn't be eating all those tide pods!

      • No, being an idiot is counting potato's as a vegetable eaten when going off of simplistic guidelines like the food pyramid as many potatoes are awash in carby starches which is fine if all you're looking at is immediate survival but not so great if you're eating the average American diet and are properly considering long term health.

    • Because too many people get annoyed when you ask them to learn something. They consider it work and don't want to deal with it.

      Technically the seed bearing part of a plant is considered a fruit. So tomatoes are actually berries but due to their low sugar content get lumped into vegetables in cooking.

      • Because too many people get annoyed when you ask them to learn something. They consider it work and don't want to deal with it.

        Although sometimes it's because something learned would contradict what they believe ...

    • We give these definitions because we want things to be understandable to stupid people.

      Although, in the case of tomatoes being vegetables, when botanically they're fruits, was to force people to pay the vegetable tariff on imported tomatoes (paid by the people importing the item, contrary to recent popular belief that they're pay by the foreign producer). From Tomatoes Have Legally Been Vegetables Since 1893 [smithsonianmag.com]:

      Like a lot of America’s history, the great tomato debate was the product of a tariff,” writes Ethan Trex for Mental Floss. After Congress passed a tariff act that imposed a 10 percent tax on whole vegetables, vegetable merchants tried to bring in some tomatoes and not pay the tariff, arguing (as so many misguided souls have since) that tomatoes are, actually, a fruit. Edward L. Hedden, the collector at the port of New York, was having none of it, and charged the tomato-selling Nix family the tariff.

      So they sued, and after six years of arguing, the case eventually made the Supreme Court. “Botanically, the Nix family had an airtight case,” Trex writes. “Legally, things weren’t quite so open-and-shut.” Dictionaries were consulted. Produce merchants were called as expert witnesses.

      But in the end, the defense’s argument of “sure, tomatoes were biologically a fruit, but for the purposes of trade and commerce—that is, the things covered by the Tariff Act of 1883—tomatoes were really vegetables,” won the day.

      The Supreme Court unanimously supported this idea. We eat tomatoes like vegetables, not like fruit. But, like most tiresome arguments over pedantic details, the case was not closed in the public forum.

    • Since we're talking about food for humans here, perhaps the easiest answer is the most obvious; How does the human body react after consuming a potato? More like it consumed a starch, or consumed a vegetable?

      Doubt the answer matters much anyway. Not like those who created the food pyramids of yore weren't being paid by food mafias, so the answer won't actually mean much of anything. The definition hinges on a cure for obesity, said no one.

      • You've hit it on the head here. Tomatoes and Potatoes are in the same family, Nightshades / solanaceae, and you can graft them to grow together on the same plant. That's irrelevant though; what matters for nutrition is how they are used when they are cooked. One is primarily simple sugars and used as a vegetable. One is primarily complex / starchy carbohydrates. For nutrition, that's all that matters..

    • But most of those people could know better, if they were better educated.

      No. Don't confuse education or intelligence with interest. There's some absolute highly educated geniuses out there who don't give a crap about whether a potato is a fruit, vegetable, berry, grain, or whatever, and only care about whether there's enough salt on it when they eat it.

    • No, nobody needs too many smart people, governing them may become a working democracy, which is hard to subvert by stupid slogans. So, it is a policy to keep 'em stupid through ejukaishon.

  • the obvious conclusion (Score:5, Funny)

    by Walt Dismal ( 534799 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @01:47PM (#64070861)

    "Obviously, potatoes are a Transvegetable."

    - General Milley

  • It seems obvious but I guess this is more about marketing potatoes to kids than the actual taxonomy.

  • What a silly argument (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <`speter' `at' `tedata.net.eg'> on Sunday December 10, 2023 @01:53PM (#64070879) Journal

    Asking whether a potato is a grain or a vegetable makes about as much sense as arguing whether the color grey is black or white.

    Let's make a new category, call it "Starchy Vegetables", and put into this group potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, squash, rutabagas, and plenty of other foods that are nutritious when served as whole foods with all their vitamins in tact, but nasty when the food industry gets their hands on them and processes them into oblivion.

    It makes me sad when I see kids in the lunchroom eating french fries hand-over-fist, but throwing baked potatoes into the garbage bin. The bigger challenge is not figuring out how to classify a potato, but rather how to teach our kids to eat and enjoy whole foods brought straight from the farm to the table.

    • You're fighting against our natural sense of "what tastes good". Evolution taught us that we want food that is high in calories. Because until about 100 years ago, eating too much was healthier than not doing so. Simply because there will be times when food gets scarce and you'll perish if you didn't stuff your gut when you could.

      Of course, that's no longer the reality on our corner of the world, but we still have the genes that let our ancestors survive when food wasn't plentiful and just a SUV-powered tri

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      Let's make a new category, call it "Starchy Vegetables",

      Or we could use the already existing term "tuber."

    • It makes me sad when I see kids in the lunchroom eating french fries hand-over-fist, but throwing baked potatoes into the garbage bin. The bigger challenge is not figuring out how to classify a potato, but rather how to teach our kids to eat and enjoy whole foods brought straight from the farm to the table.

      Swapping out fries for baked potatoes fixes absolutely nothing. Well, other than the fact kids would throw more baked potatoes in the garbage than french fries, hopefully eating fewer calories overall, but that wasn't your point. "Whole foods" doesn't fix any dietary problem we have right now. People eat too many calories with sedentary lifestyles. That's problem #1. Problem #2 is kids need a varied diet, because my god they can be picky, but they don't need a dense source of carbohydrates anywhere in the d

      • Swapping out fries for baked potatoes fixes absolutely nothing.

        Not quite true. The fries obviously have more fat, since they absorb some of the fat they're fried in. A baked potato has almost no fat at all. And even if you cook the fries in a "healthy" oil, the oil undergoes a variety of chemical changes when it's heated for a long time, which makes it less healthy.

        Although you could argue that if you load up the baked potato with butter or sour cream, it becomes less healthy than the fries.

    • Grains are also nutritious when served as whole foods with all their vitamins intact, but nasty when the food industry gets their hands on them and processes them into oblivion.

    • It makes me sad when I see kids in the lunchroom eating french fries hand-over-fist, but throwing baked potatoes into the garbage bin. The bigger challenge is not figuring out how to classify a potato, but rather how to teach our kids to eat and enjoy whole foods brought straight from the farm to the table.

      Then get tricky about it. I mean, french fries are typically not all that heavily processed. They may or may not be peeled, then sliced into the fry shape, then, especially in public school kitchens, are actually more likely to be baked than deep fat fried.

      That's a bit different than what most consider "heavily processed", which is where you'd do things like cook the potato, then dehydrate it and grind it into powder, press it into flakes, and sell it as instant mashed potatoes.

      Make french fries healthier

    • Let's make a new category

      People can't cope with the categories in the dietary guidelines as they are. Congrats you just made it more complicated and as a result your message reaches even less people than before.

    • Obligatory XKCD comic right here. [xkcd.com]

      The reason for this debate is that potato producers want their product classified as a vegetable because that affects all sorts of things (school lunch programs, prison food programs, how they can advertise, etc, etc).

      Creating a new category doesn't make that go away.

      • Yeah, that's a classic. One could say it's evolution in action.

        I am glad, though, that RS-232 has become in extinct in most corners of the technosphere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      It may seem silly to you, but remember it's often to satisfy some nutritional bill as cheaply as possible.

      After all, there was a big effort to classify tomatoes as vegetables so that ketchup could count as a vegetable portion in a school lunch.

      Likely this effort is to figure out if you can serve up french fries as "vegetable dish" that counts, because if it's a grain dish, that's a separate category and now they need to supply a vegetable side. Eliminating potatoes as vegetables would mean such staples as m

    • It's an argument because laws dictate what kinds of food go on the school lunch trays.

  • First Pluto... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @01:54PM (#64070885) Homepage

    First they declare Pluto not a planet, then they declare potato not a vegetable... Did I grow up in a lie???

  • ... published by politicians with support of the various lobbying groups is suspect
    We need evidence-based guidelines made by independent researchers
    We also need common sense. Food that comes directly from nature is better than stuff that is highly processed

  • Not vegetable (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @02:00PM (#64070911)

    I don't understand the controversy. Clearly, potatoes are animals. Why, just look at Mr. and Mrs. Potato-head.

  • A grain is a vegetable, but a potato is not a grain, even though it is a vegetable. A grain is a kind of seed. A potato is a tuber. It *contains* "seed"s, i.e. the potato eyes.

    So. A potato is a starchy vegetable. But it is not a grain, anymore than a guinea pig is a pig.

    • Re:Pigs is pigs (Score:4, Informative)

      by serafean ( 4896143 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @03:13PM (#64071117)

      No, the potato eyes are not "seeds". Same as growing onions from onions, it's akin to planting a new plant from cuttings (the term is vegetative propagation). You're thinking "seed tubers", which are tubers selected to be planted again.

      Potatoes have real seeds. Interestingly enough, the potato fruit (which contains seeds) resembles a small non ripe tomato. Don't eat it, it's toxic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        There are many legitimate meanings in English where a "seed" it the thing you start something with. Consider "seed pearl", for one example. (But I *did* put seed in quotes, because it's a slightly non-standard usage.)

        • I saw that, but the *contains* really made it sound wrong.
          The tubers do not contain anything resembling seeds. At best you can say they contain energy to restart (bad word, at a loss for a better one) the plant once conditions become good again. The "eyes" are a symptom of that restart.
          No more than onions or garlic cloves contain seeds, even though planting them creates another plant (genetically identical though)
          The standard non-standard usage regarding potatoes is "seed tuber" which do seed (verb) a new

        • If you want to be correct in your use of English and fall back on other definitions then you need to remember that seed as a noun defines actual literal seeds or male semen.

          If you're going to use seed as an adjective (such as in seed perl) or as a verb such as in to see growth you can't have the word "contains" in front of it and can't make it plural.

          There's no wider use of the English language where potato eyes are called seeds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      You're not impressing anyone here with your knowledge of what is what although I got a chuckle over the potato's have seeds bit which someone else was good enough to correct you on already. This is a reclassification for the food pyramid only and is being purposed because counting potato's as a vegetable eaten within the context of the food pyramid is self defeating in regards to ones health.

  • So... potatoes (as they're typically cooked) are a vegetable, just like ketchup? According to the USDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Tomato paste counts as a vegetable, ketchup would not. Ketchup normally comes loaded with extra sugar, that the paste doesn't have.

      And even with the tomato paste, I remember public school pizza being the bomb of school lunches.

  • Didn't they read The Martian?

    Potatoes are exopreppervegs.

    How about they just limit school lunches to foods with a glycemic index under 40?

    It's not perfect but it's better than having a squad of fools who debate unactionable categories setting policy for a half billion people.

    Foods have attributes - plants have (academic) categories.

    Or were they just trying to push certain farm subsidies and bureaucrat funding?

    Oh, yeah NYC banned whole milk in schools in 2006 but chocolate/hfcs skim milk is fine ... because

  • Again? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @02:15PM (#64070989)

    Wasn't it enough to consider ketchup a vegetable so that burger meal at the school cafeteria was a "whole meal"?

    Because I'm pretty certain this is about the same kind of corner cutting and skimping on food costs to the detriment of those that need it most.

    • It was actually tomato paste and school pizza. Requiring them to include an extra vegetable on the side would just increase the expense and the amount of food going into the trash bins.

  • Anyone who knows anything about the USDA and their whorish relationship to food producers should take LITERALLY no advice from anyone in government about what you should fucking eat.

  • WSJ writer is lazy, did no research at all (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday December 10, 2023 @04:11PM (#64071223)

    Botanists consider potatoes to be a tuberous root. I don't believe "vegetable" is a botanical term at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      ChatGPT agrees with you (and as we all know, it's utterly infallible in all things at all times:

      is "vegetable" a technical botanical term

      ChatGPT
      No, "vegetable" is not a technical botanical term. In botanical terms, plants are classified into various categories based on their characteristics, structures, and reproductive features. The term "vegetable" is a culinary and common language term used to refer to various edible parts of plants, including roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits.

      Botanically speakin

  • So if you want to be pedantic they would be starchy vegetables. In practice though, when cooking, they are treated as starch lumps.

  • ...'Nuff said. Potatoes are vegetables, same as Pluto's a planet.

  • For comparison, the article points out that under U.S. dietary guidelines, "corn on the cob is a starchy vegetable, while cornmeal is a grain."

    This isn't as crazy as it seems. Corn on the cob is a different variety of maize than the variety cornmeal is derived from, and they have very different nutritional profiles.

  • I get tired of hearing about how potatoes aren't a good choice for a vegetable. Yet if you compare the nutritional value of an actual whole potato with any other root vegetable you'll be hard pressed to find many that beat it out. Rutabega? Nope. Turnip? Nope. Carrots? Well they have a ton of vitamin A, but Other than that it's a trade off of more of this and less of that kind of deal. Carrots also have a lot more sugar. Potatoes are actually a pretty healthy food. Potato chips, and deep fried French Fries,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      You're not wrong on most of your points but you're completely missing the point on why one shouldnt be eating most potatoes all the time and that's their effect on blood sugar. They spike ones blood sugar like a can of coke https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n... [harvard.edu] which is bad in the context of developing diabetes, bad in terms of immediate weight gain as the body naturally packs on weight when ones blood sugar spikes, and bad in terms of over eating as one gets hungrier sooner after eating food like this.

      Basicall

  • This really sounds like a first world problem. The rest of the planet would be happy to eat a potato of any gender no matter what it's called.

  • Well maybe one part of it can be because you count french fries as a vegetable in school cafeterias!!! So no need for sallad when we have french fries...

  • If someone took a randomized sample, I doubt there are even 5% of families that take these guidelines into account when planning meals.

    • I guess the biggest source of controversy is that schools use the guidelines to create menus for school lunches.

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