French fries image needs work

MOSES LAKE - The French fry appears to be taking sole blame of Americans being obese.

Many organizations are vilifying the French fry as a symbol of high calorie, nutritional-less junk food.

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) said "no," when they released new guidelines that would have eliminated potatoes from school breakfasts and limited the amount of starchy vegetables, including potatoes, that could be served in school lunches.

The potato industry fought back, and in October of last year Congress saved potatoes from cafeteria banishment.

If you ask National Potato Council (NPC) Executive Vice President and CEO John Keeling, the new guidelines were really about one very specific food: French fries.

Chris Voigt, executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, went on an all-potato diet to protest the USDA guidelines. He also felt the vendetta against French fries was affecting the potato industry as a whole.

"Everything bad in the world is being blamed on the French fry for some reason," said Voigt.

Yet, only one in 10 U.S. schools still use deep fryers in their kitchens, said Keeling.

The National Potato Council wanted to know if potatoes could prepared in a way that they could remain in schools and still meet the dietary guidelines, said Keeling. They looked at the numbers and found that schools could provide potatoes to students five days a week and meet or exceed all of the key nutrition targets and all of the sodium and fat constraints imposed by the USDA, he said.

And children in all age groups were only getting 1.5 percent of their yearly caloric intake from potatoes, said Voigt.

"If we're such a small part of their diet, how are they being blamed for the obesity crisis?" he asked.

The problem is that people's entire caloric intake has increased while people have become more sedentary, said Keeling.

"It's way too complicated a thing to decide somehow that a single food is what's causing the issue," he said.

In fact, a survey of professional nutritionists found that 32 percent of respondents thought the USDA guidelines would be detrimental to student health, while 40 percent said the guidelines would not improve their health, said Keeling.

When he talked to school employees personally, they often told him they had concerns about the guidelines, including the cost of finding alternative produce to serve the students, said Keeling.

Voigt lost 21 pounds and improved his cholesterol numbers on his potato diet. He showed that people could eat potatoes and lose weight. But did the publicity make a difference?

"Yeah, I like to think that it helped," he said. "There were so many other people involved, but I think this diet ... was sort of the extra added momentum that our industry needed to get this thing done."

The diet helped show the public that potatoes are nutritious, said Voigt. Many people didn't even realize potatoes were in danger of being restricted in schools, he added, and his diet showed them what was at stake.

"A lot of people reacted to that," he said. "They were like, 'Really? The government is really trying to kick out one of the cheapest and most nutritious food items out of the school cafeteria?' So it really brought a lot of public awareness so that the rest of the industry said oh wow, this is cool, because now we can go to Congress, or we can go to the USDA, and we can get people to write letters of support on this issue. And I think it really made a difference, it really created a lot of momentum for a lot of other groups to sort of run with and to get this thing across the finish line."

While Voigt thinks potatoes are fairly safe in the nation's schools now, he thinks the battle to save them is indicative of an information problem.

"I think that a lot of people ... still don't realize how much nutrition is in a potato," he said. "I know we've gotten them some awareness, but it was just kind of a one time thing, so we really need to continually be out in front of people to remind them how much nutrition there is in a potato."

Even French fries, in moderation, have their place in a healthy diet when they're not being vilified, said Voigt.

French fries contain a lot of potassium, something most Americans aren't consuming sufficiently, said Voigt. Sufficient potassium consumption can prevent high blood pressure and heart disease, he added.

"We really kind of need to work on sort of improving the image of the French fry," he said. "And we're not trying to make French fries out as a health food, but it's okay to eat them."

While on his potato diet, Voigt's doctors made him add French fries and potato chips to his diet. Because potatoes by themselves contain no fat, he wasn't consuming any of the essential fatty acids that are vital components of any diet.

"They're called essential because they're essential," he said. "Your body has to have fat, and the fat that's in French fries is actually pretty healthy fat. It's unsaturated, healthy oils ...There's a time and a place for French fries. It's not the scourge of the earth that it's been made out to be and so that really kind of needs to be our next focus, is on trying to just educate the public that it's okay to eat French fries. Don't be scared of them. Don't eat them every meal, by any means, but it's OK to eat them in a moderate fashion."

"I think you just have to try to get the facts out there," said Keeling. "I think you have to try to work with the professional societies of nutritionists and all those kinds of stuff and just really get at what the facts are relative to potatoes and what the positives are."

Eggs were once vilified as the cause of high cholesterol, but people are now encouraged to eat an egg a day, he said, adding that the potato industry needs to study the science in the same way to show that potatoes aren't the cause of expanding waistlines.

"It is truly amazing that what should be a science question just gets so tortured," he said. Regarding potatoes in school meals, "Nobody really knew what the facts were, and we didn't either until we looked," he said. "But we took the time to look and when we did, the story was very different than what you might have thought. And interestingly, we were always portrayed as being the ones who were somehow torturing the science, and in the end I think it was really, absolutely the other way around."