Book touts potatoes’ health benefits

Author Tim Steele’s new book, The Potato Hack: Weight Loss Simplified, focuses on potatoes as an article of health and touts the potato as the best diet pill ever invented. Included in the book are simple ways to use potatoes to aid in weight loss and an extensive section on the benefits of resistant starch, of which potatoes are an excellent source. The “potato hack” diet was modeled after an 1849 diet plan for people who were becoming overweight and “dyspeptic” from, simply put, living too luxuriously. This potato diet simply called for one to eat nothing but potatoes for a few days at a time, promising that fat men would become as “lean as they ought to be.” Almost 170 years later, the population is more overweight and unhealthy than ever, but the potato diet still works because of natural drug-like agents in potatoes that affect inflammation, hunger, insulin, sleep, dreams, mood and body weight, says Steele. The term potato hack refers to a short-term (three to five days) intervention where a person eats nothing but potatoes. More