Potato, Pshaw.

(PHOTO: MELIHA GOJAK)
I’m a major potato skeptic. I say this knowing that many of my dearly beloved friends are potato adorers and will be hurt by this news.

But I dunno. I mean, I love a potato but as Anna and I discussed once, if I had to pick one member of the starch family, bread or rice would top my list. Sure I love a good potato whether it’s fried, mashed, in a bag or fingerling sized but I’d rather have pizza dough and sushi rice.

So imagine my horror to find that the BBC picked potatoes as the poster child for the news story “Starch ‘fuel of human evolution’.” They worked hard to justify their choice in the caption by saying that “the average Brit eats 500 medium-sized potatoes each year.” Still, the BBC’s audience these days is the world which I think is dominated by rice eaters these days. It’s the rize of riz people.

Regardless, the story is neat. Humans apparently have extra copies of the genes that produce the enzyme amylase, which is body’s first line of attack against starch (read about Anna’s DIY home experiment which studied amylase’s effect on jello-O pudding here). And the more a group of humans eat starchy goodness, the more copies of the AMY1 gene that makes salivary amylase they have in their genome. Or so George Perry and an army of scientists reported in Nature Genetics.

For example, the Yakut of the Arctic, whose traditional diet centres around fish, had fewer copies than the related Japanese, whose diet includes starchy foods like rice.

Essentially the moral of the story that I gleaned from the study goes like this: “Atkins, you’re full of bull, because there’s no way some unwieldy early hominin was lithe enough to feast on meat 24/7. It’s far more likely that they uprooted tubers with their newly minted fingers to fuel their rapidly growing brains and their ensuing rise to smoother bipedalism and worldwide domination.” But that just might be me.