How German Potato Salad will make you healthier and thinner

When I read about potatoes as a beneficial food, I was all ears.  As a staple of every holiday meal,  they fit most people's description of comfort food, and, well, BACON!  They fit in the Paleo gray area, but for all but a few of my athletes, I encourage most to work them back in about weekly once they've weeded out the useless processed carbs.  One of the biggest reasons being something called resistant starch

Chris Kresser has an excellent article on the finer points of why this is a fantastic thing to have in your diet, helps us with insulin sensitivity and why having the right gut flora help you maintain a healthy weight, but the gist of it comes down to foods like cooked,  cooled potatoes have the ability to provide food to some very important gut flora.  Lots of fiber provide food for these happy little bacteria to eat,  but not all can make it the distance that resistant starch can.  For example according to the Sonnenburgs from their book The Good Gut , sugar and processed foods (which act like sugars) barely make it further than the large intestine, leaving the bacteria we want and need for our health to snack on our intestinal mucosal layer or die.  Here is where resistant starch comes in... in the cooked and cooled potatoes of a potato salad.   My German potato salad is more often cooled and slightly reheated so it suits this nutritional lesson perfectly.  It also contains onions, a great source of inulin... another food for our microbial friends, plus a dab of pectin from the unpasteurized cider vinegar and you have a feast for both tongue and tummy!

German Potato Salad

6 c cubed unpeeled potatoes
1/2 lb bacon
1 medium onion, chopped
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/3 c unpasteurized cider vinegar
1/4 c water  (from the cooked potatoes)
3 T cane sugar
3 T chopped parsley

Boil the cubed potatoes in cold lightly salted water until tender.  Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp, crumble the bacon, and reserve the drippings.  Fry the onions until tender and lightly browned.  Add salt, pepper, vinegar, and water and set asside.

Drain the cooked potatoes,  add the crumbled bacon, and the vinegar mixture.

If you're like me, this is a favorite take-along for potlucks.  So refrigerate overnight and bring up to temp in your crockpot and top with parsley before serving.