How to Cook Potatoes for Diabetes

Potatoes are starchy, and starch is a carbohydrate that raises blood sugar. That much is true. But most of the research that made potatoes look bad wasn't really measuring potatoes. It was measuring French fries.

A large 2025 study in The BMJ followed more than 205,000 adults for close to 40 years. Eating three servings of French fries a week was linked to a 20% higher rate of developing type 2 diabetes. Baked, boiled and mashed potatoes showed no meaningful increase at all (Mousavi et al., 2025).

That study looked at people who didn't have diabetes yet, so it's about lowering risk rather than managing blood sugar day to day. Still, the message carries over. The potato isn't the problem. The deep fryer is.

Not every potato behaves the same way in your body, and the difference starts in the produce aisle.

Waxy potatoes hold their shape when they're cooked and tend to have a gentler effect on blood sugar than starchy ones. Look for red potatoes, new potatoes, fingerlings and most yellow varieties. Starchy potatoes like russets turn fluffy and dry when cooked, which is great for a baked potato but harder on blood glucose.

Waxy potatoes are also the ones that work best in the cooled potato dishes covered a couple of sections down, so they're doing double duty.

Leave the skin on whenever the recipe allows. That's where a good share of the fiber lives, and fiber slows how quickly the starch underneath gets digested.

Boiling, baking, roasting and air frying all work well. Each one changes the structure of potato starch a little differently, so no single method wins every time (Henry et al., 2005; Soh & Brand-Miller, 1999).

What they have in common is more useful than what separates them. None of them soak the potato in oil.

Try roasting potatoes with a spoonful of avocado oil, garlic and fresh herbs. Or boil them and toss them warm with olive oil, vinegar, chopped scallions and whatever vegetables are in the crisper. An air fryer gets you a crisp edge with a fraction of the oil a deep fryer uses.

Blood sugar responses are personal. Two people can eat the same roasted potato and see two different numbers. If you check your glucose at home, test after a few different preparations and learn what your own body does.

This one costs you nothing but a little planning. Cook your potatoes, then chill them.

When cooked starch cools down, some of it reorganizes into resistant starch. Your small intestine can't break resistant starch down the way it breaks down regular starch, so less of it turns into blood glucose. It behaves more like fiber.

Potato salad made with cooked, cooled potatoes is the easiest way to use this. You can also roast a tray of potatoes on Sunday, refrigerate them and pull from them during the week.

Two honest caveats. Reheating keeps most of the resistant starch but not all of it, so a cold potato salad has a small edge over a reheated one. And the size of the effect depends on the variety of potato you started with (Kinnear et al., 2010). Cooling helps. It doesn't turn a potato into a free food.

A potato eaten by itself hits your bloodstream faster than the same potato eaten as part of a meal. Protein, fiber and fat all slow digestion, which smooths out the rise in blood sugar.

A few pairings that work:

• Roasted potatoes with grilled chicken and broccoli
• A baked potato topped with plain Greek yogurt, black beans and salsa
• Potato salad alongside hard-boiled eggs and a big green salad
• Roasted potatoes with baked salmon and sautéed spinach

Building the plate this way has a second benefit. When there's real food surrounding the potato, a reasonable portion of potato feels like plenty.

Even a perfectly prepared potato is still a carbohydrate. A medium potato, about the size of a computer mouse, has roughly 26 grams of carbohydrate.

The simplest approach is to make potatoes one part of the meal instead of the whole meal. Fill about half your plate with non-starchy vegetables, a quarter with lean protein and the last quarter with a carbohydrate like potatoes. Our guide to diabetes-friendly food swaps walks through this plate method with real meals.

Your own carbohydrate target may be higher or lower than the standard advice, especially if you take insulin. Follow the plan your healthcare team gave you. For more on daily carbohydrate goals and meal planning, see our diabetic diet guidelines.

Sweet potatoes come up in almost every conversation about potatoes and diabetes, so let's clear this up. Botanically they aren't potatoes at all. They're a different root vegetable entirely.

Nutritionally they're close cousins. A sweet potato has a similar carbohydrate count to a white potato of the same size, so you can't eat a larger portion just because it's orange. What sweet potatoes do offer is more fiber and a lot of beta carotene, and they tend to have a gentler effect on blood sugar than a baked russet.

The advice doesn't change. Bake, roast or boil them, keep the skin on, watch the portion and put protein next to them.

Everything here is general guidance, and diabetes care is personal. Reach out to your doctor, diabetes educator or registered dietitian:

• if your blood sugar readings after meals are consistently higher than your target range,
• if you're not sure how many carbohydrates you should be eating in a day,
• or if you take insulin and want help matching your dose to a meal that includes potatoes.

If you're checking your glucose at home and seeing patterns you can't explain, bring the numbers with you. That record is often the most useful thing you can hand your care team.

Kristin Schaefer, MS CNS LDN, is a licensed functional sports nutritionist who focuses on practical, evidence-based nutrition and helping clients build sustainable relationships with food. Find Kristin at:

• Website: realfoodwholepeople.com
• Instagram: @realfoodwholepeople