Tips Nutrition professor loses 27 pounds on Twinkie diet

One of the reasons I am against government regulating our food (taxing sodas, banning Happy Meals), other than the fact that they have no constitutional authority to do so, is that "sin foods" don't cause obesity. Consuming more calories than you expend does. It's called the conservation of energy. When you ingest food, almost 100% of it is utilized by the body (save for some fiber only part of which is converted to energy). All food is broken down in the digestive tract and is used by the body immediately and if there is too much it is stored for later use. Fat is an extremely efficient energy storage medium as 1 pound of fat contains about 3,500 calories (kcal actually). So if you happen to be fat, you will have to expend 3,500 more calories than you take in to lose 1 pound of bodyfat, or about 500 calories a day if you want to lose 1 pound per week (an optimal amount for most people). A nutrition professor wanted to prove (it's been done many, many times before with such foods as McDonalds) that calories matter, not food composition (carbs versus protein versus fat): Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds. The result was a forgone conclusion:

Tips Nutrition professor loses 27 pounds on Twinkie diet

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.

The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months.

Here's the key:

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

...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.

...Haub's body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent.

I wouldn't recommend the above diet for one major reason: weight loss is not the same as fat loss. Without having access to the data, I'm going to step out on a limb here and opine that Haub lost a substantial portion of lean body mass (like muscle) as part of his weight loss. (I'll skip that there's proof that high-carb diets are bad for your arteries) When nutritional intake decreases down to deficit territory, the body cannibalizes available tissue for sustenance. The goal of course is to have this tissue be fat, but that's not always the case.  There is a bit of muscle glycogen and that doesn't last long, so what's left is fat and protein in lean tissue plus minerals which can be leached from bones if necessary. Here's the tricky part  though: certain parts of the brain cannot exist on fat calories even if the body goes into ketosis, so in the absence of dietary protein lean tissue - mostly muscle - is broken down to form glucose (blood sugar). This is exactly why bodybuilders maintain a high-protein diet when restricting calories for contest prep.

The majority of Haub's intake was carbohydrates followed by fat. There was very little protein ingested. Fat can be liberated to be used as energy only at a certain rate. Exceed that rate and in addition to muscle being converted into glucose for brain juice, the body will break that down for other functions as well. Not exactly the best way to go. That's why I suggest that part of Haub's weight loss was fat (body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent) but part of it was also lean tissue that he shouldn't have parted with.