Let them eat chips

What's Really in Our Food Tuesday, 8pm TV3

Nelson Mail TV reviewer Victoria Guild finds out why the potato deserves its place as our most consumed vegetable.

Last year was the Year of the Potato.

No, it's not a new addition to the Chinese calendar. Rather, the United Nations wanted to focus world attention on the role the potato can play in providing food security and eradicating poverty.

After all, the humble spud has attracted its share of bad press lately, what with low-carb and no carb diets all but putting it on the evil-food list.

What's Really in Our Food set out to investigate whether potatoes really were part of the reason for our widening girths.

Host Petra Bagust told us Asian and Mediterranean diets using rice and pasta were often held up as more healthy than Western diets, which rely heavily on potatoes for their carbohydrate content.

So first of all we were told what is actually in a spud. Turns out there are several vitamins and minerals such as vitamin C (more than apples), folate and, surprisingly, more potassium than bananas.

It takes fewer potatoes than rice or pasta to satisfy your hunger. So the problem really lies with how they're cooked.

Yep, deep-fried spuds are the problem. But as Bagust pointed out, us Kiwis are unlikely to give up our love affair with chips anytime soon. So she went to find out whether she could still give her kids chips with a clear conscience. As we're the third-fattest nation in the OECD, there were some lessons in chip buying that we could all follow.

Firstly, check the fat content on supermarket chips. The bigger the chip, the less fat it contains, so shoestrings are the worst and wedges are the best. Of course, you tend to eat shoestrings on their own or maybe with some tomato sauce, whereas wedges are likely to be smothered in sour cream and cheese, so maybe the condiments cancel out the benefits.

We can cook them in the oven at home, helping to reduce the fat content, but takeaway chips are a different story. As a nation, we manage to consume 3kg of fat each a year from takeaway chips. We all know why it's because they taste sooo good.

Bagust then threw too many statistics at us for me to write down but basically, by draining the chips properly and cooking them in vegetable oil instead of beef tallow, we can save half a kilo of fat each a year.

But the show wasn't all about chips. I also learned that potatoes can be stored in the ground by killing the plant, thus keeping them fresh until they are harvested, and purple Maori potatoes are chock full of antioxidants. Kumara - its sweet cousin - is high in vitamin C and most impressive of all was a study with mice that found purple kumara could reduce the risk of cancer by up to 70 per cent.

So, overall, potatoes get the big thumbs up depending on how they are cooked.

ONE TO WATCH: If you want to upsize the spills and thrills of Top Town and get a few good chuckles on the way, tune in to Wipeout (Sunday nights on TV3). It continues to amaze me how much punishment people will go through for money. I especially like the boxing glove wall - kapow.

- © Fairfax NZ News