This is interesting. While I don’t think the overall healthfulness of your stew is debatable, two of the main ingredients are fairly health-neutral IMO.
How did you decide to make white potatoes the heart of your stew? They’re nowhere on your healthy food list. And why bone broth, versus something like a veggie broth/miso base?
Why bone broth? It tastes good. If I were looking for a nutritional reason, I'd mention collagen, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous. Also, I've read that a typical American diet that includes a fair amount of muscle meat but not much in the way of organs and glands can result in imbalances among amino acids that may contribute to inflammation. For example, muscle meats have a high ratio of methionine to glycine. Bone broth has the opposite, which helps the overall balance. I'm not competent to judge the merits of this argument; I'm just repeating it. Veggie broth or miso would be fine as well, but I like bone broth as a personal preference.
Re potatoes: I know I'm going against the grain a bit, but I believe that white potatoes are nutritionally terrific.
As you'll see when I post an update commenting on my first post in this thread, I no longer include potatoes in my stew. But that's purely for reasons of convenience. (I've moved on from labor-intensive chopping and dicing.) If there were a convenient way to include potatoes, I'd include them.
Why do (many) nutritionists underappreciate potatoes?
Long-term intervention trials pertaining to diet are impractical in humans. Most nutritional information concerning humans comes from correlations found in observational studies. People fill out food questionnaires and then, down the road, regression analyses are done to find patterns between health outcomes and dietary habits. A decent amount of signal comes through with this method (fruits and vegetables are good for you, fried foods and desserts are bad for you), but some of the signal gets overwhelmed by confounders. I believe this to be the case with white potatoes.
In the United States (and most first-world countries), white potatoes are overwhelmingly consumed in the form of french fries, potato chips, tater tots, and mashed or baked potatoes slathered with butter and other accompaniments. People very seldom eat plain, boiled or baked potatoes. In addition, people tend to eat their fries and mashed potatoes alongside other unhealthy foods like cheeseburgers and fried chicken.
So on food questionnaires, the people who say they eat a lot of potatoes generally don't have stellar health outcomes. I submit, however, that it's not the fault of the potatoes, but of the frying and slathering.
The potatoes themselves have a couple of impressively healthful characteristics.
First, they are almost
literally off the charts when it comes to satiety per calorie. Of the 38 foods evaluated as part of the
satiety index, plain, boiled potatoes are an extreme outlier, ranking by far as the most satiating food.
Second, they are a nearly complete source of nutrition. If you had to pick a single food to live on for an extended period while maintaining good health, potatoes should be among the top contenders. They have sufficient protein (8% of caloric content) in an ideal ratio of amino acids. They are decently high in fiber. They are sufficient in nearly every vitamin and mineral (the exceptions being the absence of molybdenum and vitamins B12 and D, and relatively low levels of calcium). In the novel
The Martian, the main character lives only on potatoes for a year or so. That's fiction, but there's a non-fiction version as well.
Andrew from Australia lived on nothing but potatoes (and non-caloric flavor-enhancers like vinegar) for a full year and saw remarkable improvement in his health.
In short, I believe potatoes are awesome when they're not fried or loaded with unhealthy additives.