Raw potatoes

A friend of mine once observed that eating a raw potato is the closest you can come to eating dirt: crisp and a little gritty – bitter, tangy and a little bit sweet. And he’s right. A raw potato is sort of like edible dirt.

I thought of my friend when I came across an article in the BBC News last week about a leading academic scientist who believes that eating raw potatoes may help fight bowel cancer. Professor John Burn made this announcement while speaking at the British Association’s science festival in Leicester. But before you turn off the stove and start eating your spuds “in the buff,” keep in mind that Professor Burn’s statement is not the conclusion of a study, but rather the basis for a study for which he’s now recruiting volunteers.

Professor Burn believes that an indigestible crystalline starch found in uncooked potatoes, baked beans, rice and porridge interacts with bacteria in the lower gut to produce a chemical that subverts a function in specific genes that are linked to bowel cancer. But if you cook those foods, he says, the chemical structure is changed and the starch becomes useless as a cancer-fighting agent.

Furthermore, he says that any food that’s rich in carbohydrates that’s not heated will have this effect. So far he’s found about 500 people who have a susceptibility to bowel cancer who have agreed to participate in his study, funded by Cancer Research UK. He hopes to recruit a total of 1,000.

One thing is for sure: Professor Burn has come up with a way to prepare potatoes that is 100% free of the cooking oil dangers of trans-fatty acids. Someone, quick, call McDonald’s Chief Nutritionist!

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson
Health Sciences Institute