Final Day of Potato Diet
Final Day of Potato Diet. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
The day has finally come. 60 days...20 potatoes a day and Chris Voight, Executive Director of the Washington Potato Commission has really proven his point. Potatoes are not the evil diet saboteurs a lot of people think they are.
VOIGHT: You know Greg, one of the amazing things about this diet - you my goal at the end of 60 days was just to be alive, I had no idea how healthy I would get. I know that at some point passed 60 days it would not be good for me but my cholesterol has dropped 67 points, all of that primarily the LDL or the bad cholesterol; my blood sugar came down about 10% and I lost weight. I got back to a healthy weight again, I lost 21 pounds so this diet has been incredible for me.
A number of years ago when the Adkins Diet came out it almost sounded the death knell for the northwest potato industry as scores of people swore off potatoes to comply with the carbohydrate sparse diet. Voight says there were a lot of scoffers.
VOIGHT: Everybody predicted I would put on a ton of weight, my blood sugar would go off the chart, I would become diabetic, that potatoes weren’t good for you. I mean even the USDA wasn’t recognizing the nutrition value of the potato so I hope that this diet has really created some awareness and really kind of knocked some folks in the head and said hey, the potato really is good, it’s okay to eat them.
Voight says they are planning on taking their message to Capitol Hill.
VOIGHT: My whole intent for this diet was to try to get potatoes back into the WIC program and make sure they stay in the school lunch program so I haven’t approached the USDA yet and I was planning on waiting until I got done with the diet and I got all my medical results back but yeah, we’ll be headed back to Washington DC and hopefully we can set down with the Secretary of Ag and we can get this injustice fixed.
Just in case you missed it, Voight has been on a self imposed diet of only potatoes for the last 60 days with just some spices to flavor the spuds. So the big question now that he is officially done...what are you going to eat?
VOIGHT: We’ve got a fun event planned. We’re going to be out at the Head Start facility here in Moses Lake and the Beef Commission is providing some wonderful Washington beef, Stemilt is providing the apples for our meal, we’ve got the Dairy Council providing some of the dairy products for the meal and of course the Potato Commission’s supplying the potatoes so we’re going to have a big dinner event out there having some beef tacos with roasted potatoes and some apples and milk and that will actully be my first meal today and I’m looking forward to it.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
