You Don’t Want Fried With That
If anybody asks, you don’t want fried with that. Have an apple instead.
It’s never a good idea to jump to conclusions from a single study, no matter how well designed it was. Still, a study from the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain, published in the journal Gerontology in May 2008 had interesting results. The researchers looked at the diet habits of 288 people between the ages of 60 and 85 to see if any patterns of food intake could be associated with long life. They adjusted for age, gender, energy intake, chewing ability, hyperglycemia, hypercholesterolemia, physical activity, smoking habit, self-perceived health, education level and the institution from which participants were recruited. When they got done, they found that long life was directly associated with higher fruit intake, while people who ate more potatoes died earlier.
The authors of the paper aren’t convinced that eating potatoes is bad for your health – this type of result sometimes turns up by chance, and that’s why studies should be repeated a few times until there’s an obvious pattern, but if your goal in life is to make it to 100, you may want to take a look at your shopping list.