Dr. Mark Haub’s ‘Little Debbie’ Diet Attempts To Prove A Point About Human Nutrition

Filed under: In The News,Study — @ October 20, 2010

Think back for a moment about all of the sugary snacks you used to consume prior to beginning your healthy low-carb lifestyle. Yes, I realize it’s a scary thought process but hearken back for a moment to the days when you could put down some of your favorite guilty pleasures. Prior to going on the Atkins diet in January 2004, mine was one thing that is very prevalent in our culture and likely a huge culprit in the current obesity epidemic–Little Debbie snack cakes! For people who are familiar with my story, I have admitted to downing upwards of two boxes of these carbohydrate-laden snack cakes in one sitting on multiple occasions before I beat my sugar/carb addiction for good nearly seven years ago. It was nothing for me to buy 10 boxes of these snack cakes (10 for $10 when I caught them on sale!) and have two boxes of Swiss Cake Rolls, Nutty Buddy, Oatmeal Cakes, Star Crunch and/or Fudge Rounds while watching television. I shudder to think about all that I was consuming in the form of pure unadulterated garbage all those years and there’s no doubt my Little Debbie habit was a major contributor to weighing in excess of 400 pounds.

Sugar, sugar, white flour, trans fats, soy, and God knows what all that other stuff was doing inside of my body. You’d think these would be universally condemned by virtually anyone promoting healthy nutrition, right? Well, you’d be wrong. Dr. Mark Haub is an associate professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University in Manhatten, Kansas. Yes, that means he teaches the concept of diet and health to the students attending there. Last month he embarked on what was probably his most ambitious experiment yet–he wanted to see what would happen if all he ate for one month straight was a diet consisting primarily of Little Debbie snack cakes. No joke, he was dead serious about this too! He wanted to make the point to his students that nutrition is all about energy balance and by maintaining a calorie deficit (where you consume less calories than you burn) then you can lose weight.