Nutritionists to America: For the Love of God, Don't Try the Twinkie Diet

It's been making headlines all week ("Twinkie diet helps man lose weight" and "Trying To Lose Weight... Try The Junk Food Diet" might be some of the worst health-related headlines I've seen in awhile) as the Ding-Dong Diet or the Twinkie Diet, but let's just call it the worst diet ever for short. The newsplosion came from an experiment by Mark Haub, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University. In an effort to prove to his class the importance of calories in weight gain and loss, he decided to drastically change his eating habits. He embarked from the shores of a balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat (totaling about 2,600 calories per day) to a junk food diet consisting of Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos--with sides of vitamin pills, protein shakes, and small portions of vegetables. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. Why? Because he restricted his new diet to a total of 1,800 calories per day. He expected to lose weight, but was unsure about the other health outcomes of the diet. Ten weeks later his blood tests showed that both his lipid levels and glucose had lowered, a fact that would put him in a healthier heart state, according to the American Heart Association's guidelines. According to ABC News, Haub even felt better: