Over the past several weeks, I’ve received quite a few emails and comments about Kansas State nutrition professor Mark Haub and his “Twinkie Diet.” I became aware of professor Haub’s experiment awhile back because he emailed me about it. He’s seen Fat Head, and if I remember correctly, he said he shows it to his students in class.

In case you haven’t heard about his experiment, here’s a typical headline, this one from a CNN article:

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

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.

As you might imagine, a lot of the emails and comments I received included a question along the lines of “How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all those refined carbohydrates?” I replied that I’d need to see a breakdown of what he actually ate. Fortunately, Professor Haub (unlike Morgan Spurlock) has nothing to hide and has made his food log and health assessments public. I finally spent some time going over them and crunching some numbers.

So, the answer to the question How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all all those refined carbohydrates? is … (wait for it): By not actually consuming a high number of carbohydrates.

Despite the headlines, Professor Haub wasn’t living on a “Twinkie Diet” or a “Little Debbie Snack Cake Diet.” He was on a diet that includes Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack Cakes.

First, let’s look at a couple of daily menus:

November 12

Pumpkin Spice Donut

Coffee

Protein shake

Onion Rings

Steak

Broccoli

Macaroni and Cheese

Baked potato casserole

Dynasty Lychees

Baby carrots

Peanut butter cookies

2% milk

October 29

Hostess cupcake

Coffee

Sesame chicken

Teriyaki chicken

Egg roll

Chicken nachos

Broccoli

Lemon zingers

Kit Kat

Like my Fat Head fast-food diet, nobody would mistake this for any kind of health-food diet. The guy is definitely consuming sugar. And yet he lost weight, lost body fat, raised his HDL, and lowered both his triglycerides and LDL. How can that be? Well, let’s look at the numbers.

I copied the daily nutrition totals into Excel and calculated Professor Haub’s average daily intake of calories and macronutrients over the 10 weeks he’s been on the diet:

Calories: 1457

Fat (g): 61

Carbohydrate (g): 173

Protein (g): 54

As a percent of daily calories, it works out to:

Fat: 38%

Carbohydrate: 47%

Protein: 15%

Now, 173 grams of carbohydrate per day certainly isn’t low, but it’s not high either. Depending on whose figures you use, that’s about half as many carbohydrates as an average American male consumes per day. It’s also at least 1,000 fewer daily calories than an average male consumes. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Professor Haub lost weight on a “Twinkie Diet” that is actually moderate in carbohydrates and very low in calories. I’d lose weight on that diet, too. (I’d hate it, but I’d lose weight.)

I would also lose muscle on such a low protein intake, and according to his health assessments posted on Facebook, Professor Haub did in fact lose 6 pounds of lean body mass over the 10 weeks. So we’re looking at a fat loss of 20 pounds in 10 weeks, or two pounds per week.

As with dieters everywhere, his weight loss appears to be slowing down as he goes along. During the first four weeks of the diet, according to his online data, he lost an average of 3.75 pounds per week, but slowed to 1.8 pounds per week over the next six weeks. That’s not surprising. There’s usually some initial water loss in the early phase of a diet, and of course once you begin to lose weight, your basal metabolism tends to drop. What would be interesting to see is how quickly he’d regain the weight if he went back up to 2500 calories per day and consumed more carbohydrates — not that I’d encourage him to try it.

Overall, it looks like an interesting experiment, and it’s certainly generated a lot of media buzz. It’s just too bad the buzzing media reporters aren’t taking a little closer look at the professor’s online food log. There’s certainly junk food in this diet, but it is not (as one headline described it) a Junk Food Binge. When you consume fewer than 1500 calories and 175 carbohydrates on an average day, it’s not any kind of binge.