Ho-Hos, Little Debbies, Twinkies: if you were on a diet of snack cakes, would you lose weight? Mark Haub, a Kansas State nutrition professor, did. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks by replacing three meals a day with a sugary treat.
His trick: even with the junk food, he cut his total daily calorie intake from 2,600 per day to down to 1,800. He supplemented the sugary treats with fresh veggies and a daily protein shake; but he trimmed meat, dairy, and most starches from his diet, leaving junk food as his main source of calories. But despite the junk food, he not only lost weight, he even wound up with a better cholesterol balance.
But don’t go reaching for that snack cake yet. Most of us don’t have Haub’s discipline: we clean our plates, and then reach for the snacks. And our food system makes overeating shockingly easy. Between 1970 and 2004, “empty calories” soared (data from the USDA’s “food availability” database):
With such a huge increase the food system’s production of empty calories, they’re now dirt cheap, even as the price of fruits and vegetables has risen. This creates a huge problem for people who don’t have the money for fresh, healthy foods: an abundance of cheap, empty calories means we’re eating more total calories. And as Haub’s experiment with his own diet shows, it’s a rise in total calorie consumption, rather than junk food per se, that’s expanding our waistlines.
Twinkies photo courtesy of Flickr user Bill Stevenson under the Creative Commons license.
AmyLynn
Weight gain is a result of Food chemicals: The Obesity drug makers and diabetes drug makers take in 10 billion$$$$ every year with no cure!! Food Chemicals are the cause of the diabetes and obesity crisis NOT SUGAR The FDA and Drug makers know this and are laughing to the Billionaire$$$ bank! The food chemicals break the gut(insulin) and this is the cause of the diabetes and obesity crisis A filmmaker has been reversing diabetes and Obesity in now 10 countries WITHOUT MEDICATIONS and the drug makers do not promote the story just google SPIRIT HAPPY DIET
westomoon
Kinda strange to encounter this headline just as my current low-carb diet is starting to really pay off—in other words, just as my own body is showing me that the number of calories does not count if you don’t eat foods that cause inflammation, like flour and sugar. I am eating a ton of calories right now, but the weight is coming off most gratifyingly.Some years ago, I lived on the macrobiotic diet for health reasons, which also pays little attention to quantities and no attention to calories. On that regimen, the weight came off at an alarming rate.I wonder where the grant for this study came from—though I think I could make a guess. I also find it fascinating how many times I’ve read about it in the media. Quite a coincidence, no?