Like the professor in this story, I just don't know what to make of this.

(CNN) -- 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.

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?"

Rest of the story


ETA: And this is from his Facebook page:

Total cholesterol: Pre=214; wk10=184
LDL-C: pre=153; wk10=123
HDL-C: pre=37; wk10=46
...TC/HDL ratio: pre=5.8; wk10=4.0
TG:HDL ratio: pre=3.3; wk10=1.6
Glucose: pre=94; wk10=75
Blood Pressure: pre=108/71; wk10=104/76

Dang!

First, I have to say that if he'd continued eating that way I have no doubt that he'd have health consequences. Frankly that's something we should all keep in mind - think long-term not short-term when making lifestyle changes.

Second, what I make of this is that we're individuals with different metabolisms and biochemistries. Something that effects me badly may be neutral or beneficial to someone else. We see that all the time right here on this forum.

Imagine the challenge to the researcher trying to do a study. In fact that researcher who recently concluded the study comparing Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN discussed this. The study showed that Atkins was best, but when you looked only at the test subjects with insulin resistance, Atkins was even better for those individuals.

I don't believe a word of it. He ate all that carbage, yet his glucose and triglycerides went down?

Who supervised this man? And who measured his before & after lean body mass?
Something is fishy in Denmark.

The researcher is Christopher Gardner. This whole video is great, but look especially at about 40 minutes in when he starts discussing insulin resistance and the chart at about 43 minutes in which shows the dramatic difference between Atkins and Ornish for insulin resistant people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo

I don't know what happened, but he's just one guy. Maybe he's hyperthyroid. Maybe he has AIDS or pancreatic cancer or just a really fast metabolism. Maybe he lost lots of muscle mass from the lack of protein. Maybe he was bloated with water before beginning and then fasted and took diuretics at the end.

In the end, one test subject without any observation doesn't make a reliable study.

It also seems to have no relevance to women with a long history of overweight. He's young and male.

Most deleterious effects of foods (any food) manifest itself only when you are consuming more than what you need.

So I find it easy to believe that on caloric restriction these deleterious effects were absent.

Of course, without proper protein intake, this would be unsustainable.

I actually don't find this so baffling. I starved myself down to 112 lbs eating quite a bit of garbage. My coworkers rolled their eyes in disgust that I could "eat all that crap" and be stick-thin (I just didn't eat at home.) Work = hospital lab, so we often ran the tests on each other. My TC was 140-something, and my coworkers likewise thought that was awesome. But my 2hr PC sugar was ridiculously low. Either my amylase or lipase (can't remember) was through the roof. TSH was just below range. I felt like sh*t and my mental state was atrocious.

What I take away from this is that people can achieve weight loss and an improvement in lipid profile with calorie restriction, and if you're young enough and healthy enough, you can do so with garbagey non-food.

This "study" is sort of like proclaiming that you survived childhood never wearing seatbelts, nothing bad happened to you, therefore there's no reason to bother with them.

I totally buy that he lost weight by doing this. I'm thinking you would feel like crap, stay hungry, and have wicked mood swings from eating like this, but you will still lose weight. For most people, not all of course, but most...a calorie deficit is all that's needed to lose weight. Health, on the other hand, that's a different story. I don't think you'll get that from junk food .

Agreed. I'd be really interested to see what his body fat percentage was when he started/stopped the experiment.

later: Never mind...I just read the rest of the article . He did drop his percentage. He also drank a protein shake daily.

Yep
This way it is sustainable.

wow, just wow.
I totally believe you can lose weight with ANY diet and well cal's do matter.. but wow. REALLY? Why the heck would you want to eat like this?

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/...-cake-diet/9226

Jimmy Moore did an interview with him. Ugh...there's a short video of him showing what he eats. Those little debbie packages make my stomach turn. Those things are sickeningly sweet. There's no way in hell I could do this experiment on myself .

Calorie restriction does work, otherwise the calorie in, calorie out fallacy wouldn't be so persistent.

The problem is, it's grossly simplified. Our bodies aren't calorimeters.

We are designed to burn our own reserves when our body is subjected to a calorie deficit but this process is regulated. The body can and will decides to switch off the fat store release for all sort of reasons. Some of them are normal (starvation mode) and some of them not (dis-regulated metabolism).

The fact that he lost weight is not much of a surprise to me. It just means that his metabolism is not hopelessly broken.

Now let's repeat the experiment with an overweight, menopausal woman with thyroid issues and insulin resistance see just how effective the "twinkie" diet is.

The problem with all these seeming contradictions is that there is a strong tendency to believe that everyone is the same. That's just not true. We are incredibly complex organisms and lots of things can go wrong. Heck people accept that cars will burn fuel differently according to model, engine, fuel type, weight, driving methods, road conditions and the presence or lack of tune-ups. Why do they insist on thinking that human beings who are a thousand time more complex should somehow burn calories the same way.

Makes sense, he added a boatload of fat to his diet.

His previous diet was "healthy" which means full of whole grains and very little fat. That's a great recipe for high triglycerides and glucose.

A lot of guys don't actually have to do much to lose weight. They cross their eyes and stare at the moon and lose 10 pounds. Put a middle-aged woman on this diet and report back.