Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

[salvorhardin]

Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.

<SNIP>

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

"That's where the head scratching comes," Haub said. "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we're missing something?"

Full article: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html?hpt=T2

Interesting results, but as Haub admits, his weight loss doesn't really tell us anything. At best it could be considered anecdotal. Still, this is exactly the kind of diet available to those who live in food deserts where fresh fruits and vegetables (or even frozen and canned) are hard to come by, or much pricier than snack cakes.

Also, from a personal standpoint, I'm not sure how I'd fair on such a diet. I'd think I'd be constantly hungry eating only one snack cake or a handful of chips every three hours plus a protein shake and a couple of stalks of celery once a day.

[gkhouston]

1. But isn't all that barfing bad for your teeth, esophagus, and heart?

Twinkie diet... :puke:

[salvorhardin]

3. I like Twinkies!

Or at least I used to. I don't think I've had one in over a decade. But the professor didn't just eat Twinkies. It was pretty much any snack cake, donuts, chips, etc. He just limited total intake to 1,800 calories a day.

[thereismore]

2. Does he say how he feels? I bet he feels like shit. nt

[BrklynLiberal]

4. I would agree. I find it almost impossible to believe that all those

health indicators were getting better...unless they had been soooooooo bad, and he was soooooooo obese, that the diet he described was better than what he had been eating before.

[eilen]

5. unintentional benefit

no need for preservative measures after death-- extremely long shelf life.

[salvorhardin]

6. +1 ROFL! n/t

[onehandle]

7. Not eating crap and regular exercise keeps me slim.

But if one idiot's experience is all it takes to get into the news...

[glowing]

8. I think it's the small amts spread out over the day that helped him.

There wasn't one big meal that the body had to break down.... A smaller amt to break down over 3 hrs.

[glitch]

9. His pancreas just took a major pounding, I hope not irreversibly.

Guess what happens when you have no pancreas function -- you lose weight drastically. Zero absorbtion of nutrients.

[Silent3]

10. I think this points out how many kinds of diets "work".

If you pick a limited range of foods that you're allowed to eat, even foods that you normally consider delicious and indulgent, one of two things will happen:

1) You stick to the diet, but get so sick of the limited choices that you eat less of the stuff you're allowed to eat, leading to decreased calorie consumption and loss of weight.

2) Getting sick of the limited choices leads to cheating on the diet. You don't lose weight, but it's "not the diet's fault", it's your fault because you didn't stick to the diet.

You can make up an endless number of these silly diets (and people do, enough for "new" diets in practically every issue of every supermarket check-out magazine), and they'll all "work" by the above limited definition of "work": The "All Chicken and Pasta Diet", the "Broccoli and Tuna Diet", the "Jello, Pudding, and Ritz Cracker Diet", etc., etc., etc.

[salvorhardin]

11. Right

And most people don't have any trouble losing weight when restricting calories, they just can't keep up the regimen. I forget the actual stat, but some 95% of dieters regain any weight lost within two years. Even a large number of people who have bariatric surgery regain about a third of the weight lost. It's very, very hard to get around the body's homeostatic systems.