Human Nutrition Professor Loses 27 Pounds Eating Junk Food

Human Nutrition Professor Loses 27 Pounds Eating Junk Food

The weight loss is not surprising, because he ate only 1800 calories a day. Except in freaky cases, dieting is simple math. You'll lose weight if you consume fewer calories than you burn. It doesn't matter whether you eat bean sprouts or Twinkies. He ate only junk food. He drank water and diet drinks, and he took vitamin supplements.

I think I've pointed out before that Spurlock's film about McDonald's, Super Size Me, is a fraud. If he had done the exact same thing with diet soft drinks, he would have lost weight. (And many reporters and others did exactly that when replicating the experiment with variations.) Spurlock piled up his calories by a massive caloric intake in the form of sugary soft drinks. If you do that, you'll gain weight no matter how healthy you eat. McDonald's food was actually completely irrelevant to Spurlock's experiment. (The film was, however, an excellent indictment of the soft drink industry, although Spurlock was not smart enough to realize that.)

What is surprising in this latest experiment, however, is that the professor also experienced some other health benefits. After ten weeks, his fatty triglycerides were down 39 percent, his good cholesterol was up 20 percent, his bad cholesterol was down 20 percent, and he'd lost 27 pounds. Now, Haub says he's frustrated because he wishes he could say that eating like this is unhealthy and irresponsible, but the facts simply don't agree.