Rachel Huskey of Sturgeon, Missouri

In August of 2000, this 16-year-old high school student collapsed in her history class and died. The possible cause of death was a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, according to her doctors. Huskey, who had no known medical conditions, learned about the diet from videotapes purchased from a television advertisement. She followed the diet closely, eating meat, cheese, and other high-fat foods. A post-mortem examination of Huskey revealed low calcium and potassium levels in her blood. According to Dr. Paul Robinson, an assistant professor of child health at the University of Missouri, Columbia, those depletions disrupted Huskey’s normal cardiac functions and caused her heart to stop. Those depletions, Dr. Robinson said, may have been caused by her adherence to a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet.

The following statements were made by Paul and Lisa Huskey at a news conference on Nov. 20, 2003, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Lisa Huskey: “In 2000, my daughter Rachel and I went on the Atkins diet. It seemed like it was a wonderful thing that you could eat anything you want, lots of meat, it wasn't real restrictive except for the carbohydrates. We were six to eight weeks into the diet, and we had decided to take the children on an excursion before school started. So we went off [the diet] so we could eat what we wanted to eat. We were off probably approximately two weeks, and when school started Rachel began back on the diet.”

“There's the real stringent period at the very beginning, and she was on the eighth day of that diet. And I know the morning she got ready to leave, she had come back early that morning to get some shoes for band practice--they were starting marching band practice that day--and had left back to school.”

“And we got a call about 1:30 in the afternoon and said your daughter has collapsed in class. And I asked if she was breathing. They asked me if she had epileptic seizures. I said, no, she has no history of that. And we ran up to the school, and, therefore, when we got there, she was not breathing, nor the heart was beating. They were performing CPR on her. She had, before collapsing, went up to the trash can to throw something away, and when she went back to her seat she just collapsed on the floor and dropped.”

“Once we got her to the hospital, we found out that she had had an arrhythmia, and that she had passed away. And her electrolytes were all messed up from this diet. And it sounds like it's really good, like it's too good to be true, and it really is. It's very dangerous. Very dangerous diet. I wish I would have known what I know now.”

Paul Huskey: “I'd just like to say that Dr. Atkins gained her trust and then turned right around and betrayed it. And that betrayal, I wish, could have been damage to her heart or anything else. We don't have our daughter any longer. I'm asking all of you not to consider putting your loved ones on this diet because you could be next. If it's one in a million or one in however many, if that one is your child, it's one too many. Thank you.”

Lisa Huskey: “I would also like to add to that, too. With my daughter, there was nothing wrong with her. She had tree allergies. The only thing that was different in her life before she died was the Atkins diet. That was it. There was nothing else different going on with her. So, I mean, at the risk of losing weight, if I had known the risks -- I mean, everyday people don't know the physiology of a lot of this stuff. They just take him and trust him at his word, and we paid the ultimate price when we lost Rachel.”