This just seems nuts!

Leading a healthy lifestyle ain't that easy...

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This just seems nuts!

Post by slinky » 9th Nov, '10, 10:31

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
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.

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.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

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?"

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Lili Von Shtupp » 9th Nov, '10, 12:09

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Snaffled » 9th Nov, '10, 12:11

The basic premise is sound I guess. Less calories equals more weight loss. Interesting on the other indicators though...
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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Tas » 9th Nov, '10, 13:13

first year of uni I lost a stone and my diet was basically slice toast in morning if remembered, a mars bar or snickers bar and a can of coke, occasional fruit bun or jam donut and what ever I could stomach of dinner. pretty sure my health indicators weren't great, but I lost heaps of weight on fairly shyte diet. I think I played touch football that year, occasional interdepartment sports match.
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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Burbage » 9th Nov, '10, 13:14

All it means is that practically everything a dietician learns during their degree is wrong. But we knew that anyway.

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by slinky » 9th Nov, '10, 13:45

Snaffled wrote:The basic premise is sound I guess. Less calories equals more weight loss. Interesting on the other indicators though...
That's what I was thinking - I mean it's no big secret that you have to take in fewer calories than you burn in order to lose weight. So by the same principle, if you could eat enough raw carrots, for example, to take in more calories than you could burn you would gain weight. It's the fact that his LDL and triglycerides went down and the HDL went up that has me stumped (him too if you read the article).

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by T2K » 9th Nov, '10, 13:52

Exactly - if you ate 3500 cal/day of organic brown whole grain rice grown by Buddhist monks with profits going to save the whales, you would gain weight.

If you ate 1500 cal/day of pork fat, you would lose weight.

Weight control is a simple four words: Move more, eat less

People over-complicate things so much.
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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Addadude » 9th Nov, '10, 19:31

I wonder how much muscle mass this guy lost in the process? I suspect most of the weight lost was muscle tissue, not fat. Which can't be very healthy for him regardless of his LDL/triglycerides/HDL levels.
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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Lichtgestalt » 9th Nov, '10, 19:42

It's also not clear what his diet looked like before. If was eating something worse (e.g. McD) then it might well be a case of worse to bad. It also doesn't say how his levels are in comparison to other people with that BMI and an average diet

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by slinky » 9th Nov, '10, 19:57

I doubt a McD diet is actually worse, Lichty. Equally bad, maybe :lol:

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by Burbage » 10th Nov, '10, 12:15

T2K wrote:
Weight control is a simple four words: Move more, eat less
Except that it's wrong.

What you eat is important. Your body can quite happily regulate its own weight if it is fed with foods that it can control the digestion of. You can even eat more than you need--AS LONG AS YOU EAT THE RIGHT FOOD. It doesn't need exercise to regulate weight. Exercise is good for cardiac fitness, but it is not necessary for weight control at all.

The problem is that our bodies do not regulate the uptake of sugars and starches. Therefore we must consciously regulate them. We didn't evolve in the presence of these foods, and our bodies have therefore never evolved a method of regulating them. You could say that our intelligence allows us to make choices about how much to eat, but the obesity epidemic gives lie to that.

There are two kinds of food: Energy and raw materials (rm=nutrition). The diet listed above was made up solely of energy. If you digest more energy than you use your body will generally lay down fat. If you digest less energy than you use your body will generally burn up fat. Of course, if you think just in terms of energy, you can increase the amount of energy your body uses by doing exercise, but it isn't necessary. Just eat less energy.

I use the term digesting for a specific purpose. What you eat and what you digest are two different things. Practically all the sugar and starch you eat will end up in your blood, but most other foods are only partially digested as they pass through your gut, depending on a large number of factors. One of the more interesting aspects to know about the above diet is how much faeces the guy produced. I'd say hardly any at all. In fact most calorie control diets are crap because to measure your calorie intake correctly you have to subtract the calorific value of your urine and faeces from the calorific value of the food you eat. Not many people do this.

Nutrition, of course, is what stops you wasting away and getting diseases like scurvy etc. Bearing in mind that as long as you have water it takes about 60-70 days of no food at all to starve yourself to death, I don't think the guy above put himself in too much danger. But those who have lived on similar energy-only diets for longer periods (ie starving countries we send nothing but rice to) do suffer severe malnutrition, and do eventually die, even though they are getting the recommended daily amount of calories.

As for the cholesterol and blood pressure measurements, imbalances in these factors are caused by obesity (or genetic causes), not by diet. Once the obesity goes away the obesity related readings go away.
Last edited by Burbage on 10th Nov, '10, 12:16, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by slinky » 10th Nov, '10, 13:08

As for the cholesterol and blood pressure measurements, imbalances in these factors are caused by obesity (or genetic causes), not by diet. Once the obesity goes away the obesity related readings go away.
This is what I wondered when I first read this article - did his LDL and triglycerides go down solely due to the weight loss and did the HDL go up for the same reason? Sounds like that is what you are saying, Burb. So, my next question is, since Mr. S is one of those people with genetic factors that are affecting his blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels (he has never been even close to obese) is it primarily the cholesterol reducing drugs he's on rather than his carefully monitored diet that are keeping his LDL so low? Or is it still possibly a combination of the 2? I ask because he's apparently genetically at risk for clogged arteries so it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for him to eat 'crap food' over more healthful food choices.

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by BoD » 15th May, '11, 02:14

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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by bryannnnn » 3rd Jun, '11, 18:10

Just because one bloke loses a lot of weight on a low-calorie twinkie-only diet doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will get the same results.

It also doesn't say what actually constituted the weight loss. I'd venture to say that, as posted by Addadude, he lost a boat-load of muscle, as well as some fat. With the lost muscle tissue, he lost his ability to store glycogen, which means he also lost the ability to store water in said muscle tissue, rendering him wiry and flaccid.

He probably lost a fair amount of bone density too.

In all likelihood, his health also took a major hit. There's no way your body won't suffer from losing half a pound a day for 60 days in a row. Although the damage won't necessarily manifest itself until later.

And how much weight was packed back on 2 weeks after going back to his normal diet?

In other words, weightloss schmeightloss; his experiment, apart from being a bit silly, proved nothing that we didn't already know.
Last edited by bryannnnn on 3rd Jun, '11, 18:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: This just seems nuts!

Post by qiaoqiao » 7th Jun, '11, 12:01

bryannnnn wrote:Just because one bloke loses a lot of weight on a low-calorie twinkie-only diet doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will get the same results.

It also doesn't say what actually constituted the weight loss. I'd venture to say that, as posted by Addadude, he lost a boat-load of muscle, as well as some fat. With the lost muscle tissue, he lost his ability to store glycogen, which means he also lost the ability to store water in said muscle tissue, rendering him wiry and flaccid.

He probably lost a fair amount of bone density too.

In all likelihood, his health also took a major hit. There's no way your body won't suffer from losing half a pound a day for 60 days in a row. Although the damage won't necessarily manifest itself until later.

And how much weight was packed back on 2 weeks after going back to his normal diet?

In other words, weightloss schmeightloss; his experiment, apart from being a bit silly, proved nothing that we didn't already know.
totally agree! a healthy diet coupled with exercise is the way to go people!

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