It’s the best thing since sliced potatoes deep fried and dipped in sour cream and chives.
Nutrition professor Mark Haub lost 27 pounds in two months eating Twinkies, Little Debbie snack cakes and Kellogg’s Corn Pops (formerly known as Sugar Pops).
Oh, baby, stop those presses and pass the brownies!
I was so inspired that I zipped right off to the grocery for research materials. I made myself just sick – but blissful – with nutrition.
Our new national hero, Dr. Mark D. Haub, decided to test the theory that for weight control, it’s the calories that count.
Not tasteless rice cakes. Not vegetables so raw that dirt and earthworms still are dripping off them. Not hours of tortured, body-aching exercise.
To prove his point, the assistant professor in the Department of Human Nutrition at Kansas State University Haub ate so-called junk food.
Every three hours, he downed a Twinkie or appropriate substitute, such as Oreo cookies, Hostess Ding Dongs, Little Debbie Star Crunches, sugar-powered cereals and – for a change of pace – Doritos chips.
Haub, a guy in his late 30s with a university doctorate degree ate like a guy in his late teens with a university dorm room food budget. He called it the “convenience store diet.”
The results rocked the world.
The Daily Mail in London on Nov. 11 screamed the headline, “Nutrition expert loses TWO STONE by eating doughnuts, cakes and crisps for ten weeks.”
The Age in Australia proclaimed on Nov. 10, “After eating sponge cakes, biscuits, some raw vegetables and drinking full-fat milk and a protein shake every day, Haub revealed this week that he had lost 12.1 kilograms from his original 91.3-kilogram body weight.”
And CNN right here in the U.S. of Fast Food Drive-Throughs A., began its Nov. 8 report with the opening paragraph: “Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.”
The final stats are these:
Before his Twinkies diet, Haub had been consuming about 2,600 calories a day, weight 201 pounds and showed a body mass index of 28.8, which is overweight.
For 10 weeks, he limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. Two thirds of it came from snacks. He also took in a daily multivitamin, daily protein shake, a few vegetables and a double espresso.
The end result was a weight of 174 pounds and a normal body mass index of 24.9. Plus, his triglycerides fat level dropped 39 percent, his bad LDL cholesterol dropped 20 percent and the good HDL cholesterol increased by 20 percent.
“That’s where the head scratching comes,” Haub told CNN. “Does that mean I’m healthier?”
Since the news broke, a whole menu of doctors and dietitians have been answering that question with a lot of mumbo-jumbo that makes no sense to me, and some suggestions that the real ding dong is not a snack cake.
Who cares? We hot fudge sundae lovers insist that you don’t tamper with monumental news like this.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to run down to the snack machine. Suzy-Q’s are up and I’m on a strict diet.