Potato Intake and the Risk of Overweight/Obesity, Hypertension, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Observational Studies.

Context: Results from observational studies and meta-analyses examining the relationship between total, fried, and nonfried potato intake and cardiometabolic disease remain conflicted.

Objective: The aim was to synthesize existing evidence on the relationships between total potato intake and specific types of potato intake with the risk of overweight/obesity, hypertension, diabetes, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), cardiovascular disease (CVD), coronary heart disease (CHD), and stroke.

Data sources: Systematic searches were conducted in PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science until July 13, 2023.

Data extraction: Data extracted from studies included first author, publication year, location, data source, follow-up duration (cohort studies only), demographics, sample size, cases, outcomes, exposure and outcome types, measurements, adjustments, study design, potato intake categories, and adjusted risk estimates (odds ratio, relative risk [RR], hazard ratio) with 95% CIs.

Data analysis: Random-effects models were applied to estimate the summary RRs and 95% CIs.

Results: Fifty-one articles (103 studies) were identified in the current meta-analysis. Comparing the highest with the lowest categories of total potato intake, total potato intake was not associated with hypertension (summary RR = 1.07; 95% CI: 0.95, 1.21), diabetes (1.08; 95% CI: 0.96, 1.22), GDM (1.16; 95% CI: 0.86, 1.57), CHD (1.00; 95% CI: 0.99, 1.02), CVD (0.97; 95% CI: 0.91, 1.03), or stroke (0.97; 95% CI: 0.88, 1.06); fried potato intake was not associated with overweight/obesity (1.24; 95% CI: 0.90, 1.70) or GDM (1.03; 95% CI: 0.97, 1.09) but was significantly associated with increased diabetes risk (1.16; 95% CI: 1.04, 1.30); nonfried potato intake was significantly associated with increased diabetes risk (1.05; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.10) but not hypertension (1.06; 95% CI: 0.97, 1.15).

Conclusion: Total potato intake was not associated with an increased risk of hypertension, diabetes, GDM, or cardiometabolic disease, but both fried and nonfried potato intake may increase the risk of diabetes but not other cardiometabolic diseases. Future cohort studies are needed to explore the association between different types of potato intake and cardiometabolic disease. In addition, the limited number of studies on total potato intake and overweight/obesity/heart failure, fried potato intake and CHD/stroke/heart failure, and nonfried potato intake and overweight/obesity/GDM/CHD/CVD/heart failure prevented us from conducting an analysis.

Systematic review registration: PROSPERO registration no. RD42023454244.