Dumbfounded by the Twinkie Diet?

I recently stumbled across the Twinkie diet.  If you haven't read up on it you can do so here, Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Processor Loose 27 pounds.  This is a diet where a nutritional professor lost 27 lbs in two months eating junk food, primarily consisting of the little unsavory snack called Twinkies.  He wanted to prove a point that you can loose weight primarily by caloric deficit.  However, I would never advise such an approach and I feel this study is dangerously misleading.  Here's why:

According to Whole Health Source article to follow up on The Twinkie Diet for Fat Loss

There are many studies in which rodents are made obese using industrial high-fat diets made from refined ingredients [Matt:  Twinkies ring a bell here??]. The rats eat more calories (at least in the beginning), and gain fat rapidly. No big surprise there. But what may come as a surprise to the calorie counters is that rodents on these diets gain body fat even if their calorie intake is matched precisely to lean rodents eating a whole food diet. In fact, they sometimes gain almost as much fat as rodents who are allowed to eat all the industrial food they want. This has been demonstrated repeatedly.

The clear distinction to see here, and what most people do not realize is that, caloric counting does not take into account absorption and conversion of foods into energy!  The benchmark Calories in your food are measured against is the amount of energy required to heat water!  Water is a far cry from how much energy food supplies to your body and in turn how much excess energy is stored as fat or left unprocessed poised for exit from the body.

Eating primarily junk food leads to many health implications.  Despite the professor lost 27 pounds (by default makes you feel good) he still provided very little or suboptimal nutritional value in his diet.  In the long run this deficit of nutritional value will add up while low quality junk food ingredients accumulate in his body.  This leads to complex health related issues that we don't even want to explore.  So I ask why would you deprive your body of what it needs most to eat junk.  This doesn't sound like a solid approach to becoming healthier and loosing weight...

After all you are what you eat and do you want to be a cream puffed process Twinkie??

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