Sorry, but Potatoes May Soon No Longer Be Considered a Vegetable

Personally, I think they should have been put in the same category as grains all along.

They'll need to change the name of that category though, making it clear that it's a "starchy carbs" category.

Acting like potatoes are a vegetable on a par with spinach, broccoli, or even the tomatoes they mention in the first part of the story has always just sounded wrong.

The category name should be changed from 'grains' to 'starches'.
Also, tomatoes are fruits.

Potatoes are a great food.

My boys can be high calorie consumers. Potatoes are a nutritious starch. Potatoes will always bre a starchy vegetable, to me.

Pasta and bread are much reduced in my family. Grains, especially wheat, is not even close to potatoes. Nor vice versus.

Sweet potatoes and "Irish" potatoes are a great staple. Even DrAtkins allows a serving of potato now and then on maintenance.

Our metabolism is so badly wrecked by SAD that safely tolerating potatoes becomes an issue. If we ate properly our whole life AND exercise properly our whole life, starchy foods are not a problem.

Another common vegetable, corn, is classed as a vegetable. In my house its a grain. Afterall the horses and sheep and chickens eat a boatload of corn!!

Back to potatoes.

Potatoes are a problem for the overweight and obese if weight loss and maintenance is a problem.

My teens eat so many potatoes, I started growing many varieties. A blue potato salad is pretty fun. My boys are both low BMI, cant pinch an inch, can pinch a half inch, because they also physically move. For them, potatoes are a nutrient dense food.

For me, potatoes are a rare thing.

Yeah, but the USDA classifies them as vegetables.

The USDA has some very bizzarre classifications for crops -

For instance they classify mature soybeans as grains, even though they're legumes. But immature green soybeans (edamame) are classified as a vegetable.

Corn is classified as a grain when it's grown to maturity (dry enough to be ground into cornmeal or used as feed for livestock), but classified as a vegetable when picked young and tender.


^^^This came as a surprise to me when I inherited part of the farm after my mother passed away a few years ago - I was talking to DB about wouldn't it be great to switch to raising beef and/or vegetables, and he said something along the lines of "can't do that - the farm is listed by the USDA for growing grain, I'm listed as a grain farmer - we could raise some for our own use, but wouldn't be able to sell any of it, because we'd be fined more than we'd ever earn from it for selling unauthorized products". Basically, we could go through a lot of channels and years of attempting to get those designations changed, but you can't just switch on your own. (and we're both in our 70's so it could take the rest of our lives, and that's before you even begin to try to convert a "grain" farm to other types of products - I'm just glad all our grain is sold to companies that produce chickens, so at least it's being used to produce animal protein. Yes, some of those chickens may end up as chicken nuggets, but at least our corn and soybeans are not going directly into the starch and sugar laden UPF food pipeline)

But back to the topic of soybeans being considered to be a grain, when he said we were listed as grain farmers, I said "but soybeans aren't a grain - they're a legume!" and he said "not according to the USDA". So here we are with crazy classifications for various crops.

Thank you for feeding my chickens and sheep!!

LOL!

Our farm is in MD (I don't live there though), and there's a huge number of chicken farms in that part of the state, so I doubt any of our grain is ending up in Massachusetts. Unless you happen to buy grain from or raise chickens for Perdue or Mountaire.

Mountaire produces and processes some of the chicken that is sold at Aldi in this area (Aldi buys all their meat dept foods from regional producers)- always makes me feel like I'm buying "home grown chicken" when I buy their chicken sold under the Aldi name, because some of the feed those chickens ate MIGHT have actually come from our farm.

What’s the definition of “vegetable”? Seems to me that anything that grows in, on, or under the ground could qualify. What are mushrooms? Well, fungi--a different category from vegetable. What about Seaweed?

Beans (not green beans), peas, and corn are on my list of “starches” I don’t eat. So is rice. Where does vegetable end and starch begin??

I think I’ll let someone else worry about all that.

I’ve decided to include the occasional portion of baked sweet potato in my allowed foods. Definitely a starch, oozing with sugar. So delicious! I make the “excuse” that sweet potatoes have a number of nutrients white potatoes don’t. I eat the skin, of course, because the fiber offsets the starch.

YMMV!

Maybe they need to have a separate classification for starchy vegetables.

They used to have the starchy vegetables classified with really sugary fruit way back when:


Of course that's 3 separate sections for fruits and vegetables, but it at least makes it clear that you can't just equate potatoes with spinach or broccoli.

But notice also that they didn't specify the number of servings from each group (much less the size of a serving), just that you needed some of each group each day.

I'm not finding any info on when this was published - but based on the type of clothing shown, my guess is it was no later than the 50's.... when there was very little available in the way of convenience or treat foods, and almost everyone was in a normal weight range.

1943! The USDA introduces the “Basic 7” food
guide, aimed at maintaining nutrition standards
during the wartime period of food rationing.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/wp-con...yramidsetal.pdf

Newest plate is 2011. "Potatoes and French Fries don’t count". It was clearly spelled out in 2011 [ by Harvard at least]

Growing up (50’s and 60’s) our dinners always consisted of a protein (meat or fish), a starch (potato, rice, peas, corn or squash) and a non-starchy vegetable like broccoli or cauliflower. I cut out the starchy stuff 20 years ago, leaving the protein and vegetables. For dessert we always had fruit, which I also cut out 20 years ago, except for berries.

Jey - that makes sense - couldn't tell for sure if it was '40's or 50's, although the way it says "US needs us strong" made me think it was probably during WWII, but perhaps a decade later. What info I found didn't say when or why.

I know there were campaigns to get people to eat more bread during the 20's when the country was producing more grain than they could use. (then the dust bowl hit in the 30's and they could have really used all that excess grain if they'd kept it in storage - but then lack of sufficient storage to hold all the excess grain was part of the problem in the 20's.

I saw that about the potatoes on some version of My Plate the other day - I think the only time that showed up though was a version specifically for seniors, just to remind them that you can't just load up on potatoes and call those your veggies for the day.


Cotonpal - we always had potatoes and/or bread (rarely had rice or pasta of any kind) when growing up in the 50's and 60's, but didn't have a truly green veggie, except for green beans (spinach was a rarity, and we never had green salads), because our other "green" veggies were peas and immature lima beans. Apparently the logic was that they were green, so they counted as green veggies. When we had corn or carrots, they were both just considered to be veggies too - neither were counted as starchy in place of potatoes or bread. (if they had been, maybe my blood sugar wouldn't have been such a mess) I recall when I was in elementary school that we'd have tomatoes from the garden, which should have been a very healthy vegetable. But we would eat them with a big spoonful of sugar on each slice. Fruit was usually canned. Mom would only buy the fruit that had "light syrup". I think it's almost as high in sugars as the fruit in "heavy syrup" though.

This was a doctor approved, healthy diet at the time.

When I was put on a lower carb diet for hypoglycemia (which was actually a diabetic diet - the Dr said it was the same diet for hypoglycemics) in the early 70's, the written diet wasn't terribly LC. I calculated the carbs a couple of years ago from that diet, and it would have been about 120 g/day, since they were allowing 1/2 cup potato AND 1 slice of bread for dinner, 4 oz juice AND 1 slice toast at breakfast. Gravy was forbidden. I can't recall exactly what the lunch menu said I could eat, but I vaguely recall something about open faced sandwiches, so I'm sure it had about 30-40 g carbs just like dinner and breakfast. The green and orange/yellow veggie selection was pretty much the same as we were already eating. Of course added sugars were not allowed.

I was the one who decided that for me 1/2 cup of potatoes and 1 slice of bread simply weren't worth bothering with, since at the time I couldn't comprehend eating less than 1 cup of potatoes (especially if I wasn't allowed to have gravy on the potatoes - heresy!) or only one slice of bread for a sandwich - might as well not bother with them at all. I'm sure it worked out a lot better blood sugar wise.

(There was no explanation of carbs vs proteins or fats with that diet - It was a long time before I started to pick up on what they were doing, aside from cutting way down on my favorite foods)

My father was a doctor so I suppose the way we ate was doctor approved. We didn’t have much sugar, no soda, no candy, some baked goods and ice cream, fruit was fresh. On the whole it was a pretty healthy way of eating. At least it was not filled with junk.

We had junk - my dad had a sweet tooth, and mom did too. We almost always had a cake she'd baked from a mix, and used canned frosting for it - but she didn't like "grease" at all (and shortening/oil is one of the primary ingredients of frosting), so she'd stretch one can of frosting to 2 cakes - the cakes were made in a 9x13 pan so only one thin layer of frosting was necessary. Dad also loved ice cream, and he loved cookies, so we always had a cookie jar that was kept stocked. They both liked hard candy too. I couldn't have cared less about the hard candy, but sure liked the cake and cookies. Ice cream was just ok as far as I was concerned, since they didn't usually get the flavors I liked best.

We didn't have soda though - at least not until I was in my late teens, which is probably why I never really developed a serious craving for sodas. We usually had chips though - plain potato chips and sometimes Fritos.

I did develop a bad "Tang" habit in my teens though - Were they even putting full ingredient lists on manufactured "foods" back in the 60's? Because for some reason mom must have thought Tang was better for you than orange juice, and I loved the sweet/sour artificial orange flavor that I could get away with making as strong (meaning: sweet) as I wanted it.

So there were junky treats available all the time at home for in between meals, but the only time we had an official dessert was after the evening meal... because apparently meals had to be what mom thought was healthy, but it was perfectly ok to have desserts and snacks that were absolute junk.

That chart reminded me of my childhood in the 50s. We learned it at school. These are the categories that still exist in my head.

My mom was a good cook. She had battled her weight since she was a teen, so I assume she was mindful of nutritional values. Back then, nobody ate fast-food or highly-processed foods with countless chemical additives. Heck--I grew up without Mac n’ Cheese! Except the kind mom made occasionally--probably with Velveeta.

My only acquaintance with spinach was from cans. Gray-green slime! Yechhhh! Later, we got the frozen kind--a great improvement. But who knew fresh spinach could be so delicious--not to mention a wide variety of other leafy greens.

I remember my mom sweating through endless exercise classes. She used Metrecal for a time, probably a nasty-tasting beverage. I inherited “fat genes” from both sides of my ancestry. So...here I am.

P. S. My mom’s parting gift to me when I left for college: scales.