Potatoes

Variety barely moves the raw numbers. Per 100 g raw and without skin, russet runs 83 calories, red runs 76, and gold runs 74. Protein spans 1.8 to 2.3 g and carbs span 16 to 17.8 g across the three, a smaller gap than tracking advice implies when it treats "waxy" and "starchy" potatoes as different foods. The real difference between white varieties is texture in the pan, not macros in the log. Gold is also the variety behind the high-protein soup, where 250 g of it simmers alongside chicken and lentils as the starch base rather than standing alone on a plate.

Sweet potato does not carry the calorie discount its reputation implies. Raw and without skin it runs 79 calories per 100 g, inside the 74-to-83 range of the white varieties. Baked in skin it runs 90 against 87 for potato boiled in the skin. What actually separates them is sugar: sweet potato baked in skin carries 6.5 g per 100 g against roughly 1 g for a boiled or baked white potato. Pick sweet potato for the flavor, the color, or the different micronutrient load that comes with the skin, and expect a similar calorie line either way.

Cooking method moves more than variety does, and the oil is almost the whole story. A baked russet, skin and flesh together, runs 95 calories and 0.1 g of fat per 100 g. Oven french fries run 158 calories and 5.5 g of fat, a jump of roughly 66% on calories and more than 40x on fat for the same weight of potato. Sodium moves the same way: 14 mg per 100 g baked against 324 mg for the salted, oven-fried record. None of that is the potato. It is what happens between the potato and the plate, and logging the dish by the word "potato" instead of by the cooking method is how the gap disappears from the day's total.

Boiling and baking land close to each other. Boiled potato, skin off, runs 86 calories per 100 g. Baked russet with the skin on runs 95. The nine-calorie gap is small next to the french-fry gap above, so pick boiled or baked on convenience and texture rather than on macros.

The skin carries most of the measurable fiber. The baked russet record, which keeps the skin, reports 2.3 g of fiber per 100 g. The boiled records, flesh only, report 1.8 g regardless of whether the potato was boiled with the skin on or off. Cooking method differs between those records too, so this does not isolate the skin cleanly, though it is consistent with the skin holding a real share of the fiber. Eat the skin when fiber is the goal.

Raw potato fiber is not on this page, and that is deliberate. The USDA's routine fiber method reads unusually high on raw potato because it captures resistant starch, which behaves nothing like fermentable fiber once the potato is cooked and eaten. Left in, that reading would rank raw potato above lentils on this site's fiber comparisons. The four raw records here carry no fiber number for that reason. Fiber claims on this page come from the baked and boiled records instead, measured the same way the rest of the site measures it.

A cut that runs on volume rather than restriction. Satiety index work ranks boiled potato at the top of the foods tested, ahead of the usual high-protein anchors.^satiety A 300 g boiled potato costs 258 calories and fills most of a dinner plate on its own. Build a cutting plate around potato volume plus a lean protein rather than around cutting portions to the bone.

Cooked-and-cooled potato changes its own starch. Chilling a cooked potato converts some of its starch into resistant starch, which digests more like fiber than like sugar. Potato salad made with a vinegar dressing and eaten cold is one of the more accessible ways to eat resistant starch without a specialty ingredient. The records on this page measure potatoes hot, so the chilled-preparation number belongs in the glossary entry, not here.

A post-training carbohydrate, judged on total grams rather than speed. Glycemic index ranks how fast a carbohydrate source raises blood glucose, and potato's ranking moves with cooking method and with what it is eaten alongside, which this page's records cannot settle. What the records do settle is the gram target: a 299 g baked potato clears 64 g of carbohydrate in one sitting, a full post-workout serving on its own. Pair it with a protein source, since the potato itself carries under 8 g of protein at that weight.

A potassium source that beats the food people default to. Potassium is not one of the macros tracked on this page, but the USDA's full nutrient panel for baked potato puts it well ahead of a banana on a per-100 g basis.^potassium Readers stacking potassium against sodium for hydration or blood pressure reasons have a bigger lever in the potato drawer than in the fruit bowl.

Where it does not fit. Ten french fries at 76 g already carry 4.2 g of fat and 246 mg of sodium, and a fast-food portion runs several multiples of that weight. That is a frying-oil-and-salt problem wearing a potato costume, and the fix is the baked or boiled record on this page, not avoiding potatoes. Raw potato belongs on a cutting board, not a plate, so treat every raw record here as a scaling reference for the cooked version you are about to eat.

The decision rule for the whole page is short. Pick the record that matches how the potato actually left the kitchen, because the word "potato" alone can mean anywhere from 86 to 158 calories per 100 g depending on what happened in the pan.