The Twinkie Diet Makes a Legitimate Point

The Twinkie Diet got more press this week. In this classroom study, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate a diet of protein shakes, canned vegetables, multi-vitamins and snack foods like Twinkies and chips for two months and lost 27 pounds.

What was his point? That losing weight is purely a mathematical equation. It has to do with consistently eating fewer calories than your body needs to burn each day and that the underlying food is irrelevant, at least as long as some of it is actually healthy.

So why all the emphasis on protein diets or vegan diets or low fat diets? They are all means to give people foods that may be more energy rich to drive less snacking. If a carbohydrate rich diet leads to a person being hungry every hour and a half and, as a result eating 3000 calories a day then, it is believed and has been proven in statistically large studies of dieters, eating protein at each meal makes it easier to get through the day and eat only 1800 calories.

If you are very diligent about food logging and very disciplined about your caloric intake, then you too can diet while eating only Oreos, Tostitos and Twinkies. That just isn't a reality for most people. Frequently, once they start snacking, dieters feel badly about abandoning their diet and take a plunge off the deep end of their diet--eating the entire family sized bag of Tostitos in one sitting, with cheese dip--rather than negotiating with themselves about how the snack will now mean that what they planned to eat for the rest of the day may have to change.

I think that the Twinkie diet makes a legitimate point that dieting does not have to mean suffering, and giving up all the foods you used to like to eat. However, it does mean a full-time commitment to negotiating caloric tables and sticking to your target caloric intake every day.

Reference Article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-twinkie-20101115,0,405998.story

New Rutgers Study Shows High Protein Diet Helps Limit Bone Loss

I know it seems like every week there is a new study that tells you what you thought was good for you to eat was actually bad for you and vice versa.  A new study offered at the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research indicates that a higher protein diet for women, when calcium and and vitamin D were held constant, resulted in less bone density decline.

What I liked about this study was its size and length.  Forty-seven women participated for a year.  The size is statistically significant and the duration was long enough to measure real effects.  Many studies that get into the news have fewer than 25 subjects and last as little as 12 weeks.  I think this offers credible evidence that particularly as women approach menopause and begin to experience hormonal changes that can affect nutrient absorption and bone density, increasing the level of protein as a percentage of total calories is important.

This isn't a permission slip to eat at Texas Roadhouse three times a week, but yet another observation, that the typical American diet, which is laden with more carbohydrates and fat than protein, needs to be tweaked to include more protein in the mix to stay healthy.