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.
Christine would put these boxes in the bottom of the refrigerator to get them good and cold so they’d have a nice dense “bite” to them when I put them in my mouth. I could literally just keep on eating and eating these snack cakes like there was no tomorrow because I’d never get full. And sometimes I’d even wash them down with a big tall glass of 2% milk since it was so healthy for me. Yes, I was a nutritional dope at one time, but not anymore. Taking a look at the nutritional label of my favorite Little Debbie snack cake–Swiss Cake Rolls–I can hardly believe I was consuming two boxes of this in one sitting:
Be still my fluttering heart! That was nearly 40g total carbohydrates in each two-cake package, 26 of which was sugar, and I was consuming 12 packages of these in two boxes. Doing the math on that, I was ingesting just in this one sitting upwards of 480 grams of total carbohydrates! Yikes! Again, this doesn’t even count the hundreds of wasted carbs I was ingesting from my addiction to sugar soda that easily pushed my carbohydrate consumption well over 1,000g daily. It’s too scary to even think about anymore. And just take a look at the ingredients in what I was eating:
Sugar, sugar, white flour, trans fats, soy, and God knows what all that other stuff was doing inside of my body. Looking at these cold hard facts about what is contained in a typical Little Debbie snack cake product, you’d think that they 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.
I suppose it was a novel concept to prove a point, but unfortunately Dr. Haub’s experiment neglects to take into account the hormonal response that consuming high-sugar, high-carbohydrate junk foods like Little Debbie snack cakes can have on some people who are diabetic, insulin resistant, or have an extreme addiction to carbohydrates/sugar. The insulin spike to such a diet for some people is of great concern to me, so I decided to contact him directly with some questions regarding his sugary diet.
Dr. Haub was gracious to answer my questions regarding his “Little Debbie” diet:
1. What do your menus normally look like and what exactly and how often are you consuming the foods during this experiment? What are the specific vegetables and how much are you consuming with your family during mealtimes? What level are you keeping your calories at on a daily basis?
All of these questions are answered in the following YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il14X_zKvbA
So, he was drinking coffee, eating some veggies, having a little milk for protein, and the rest of his diet was Little Debbie snack cakes up to 1800 total calories daily. According to his Twitter page, Dr. Haub has lost 19 pounds in six weeks.
2. I understand you’re tracking your weight and cholesterol, but what about blood sugar levels? Are you taking fasting and post-prandial readings?
Yes, blood glucose decreased, too. A colleague requested an oral glucose tolerance test, so that will be done before I hit weight maintenance.
3. What kind of multivitamin are you using and are you supplementing with anything else like Vitamin D or other added nutrients?
I am taking 1-2 multi-vitamin supplements (Centrum/Geritol) each day. The difficulty in tracking nutrients is that the online database I am using does not include most micronutrients in their database. So, the USDA database states that a food contains X grams of magnesium, yet that does not appear in the online database.
4. Are you hungry often on this “Little Debbie” diet? How many meals are you eating in a day? What is your body craving the most? How have you dealt with the cravings?
No, not hungrier than when I was following other dietary behaviors (Atkins and high-fiber/low fat). I have never craved sweets, so the added sweeteners in the foods are not “addicting” as many claim. Not sure what my body is craving, however the foods I crave (not sure why — physical and/or mental) most are hamburgers and sandwiches.
The diet has been very easy for me to follow–I eat by myself frequently, the foods are shelf-stable and easy to carry (no refrigeration), the portions are pre-determined, there is little food preparation involved (open box and remover wrapper) and the foods/supplements are inexpensive (~$8/day with ~60% of costs being coffee and milk/protein) and they are readily available.
5. Are you exercising at all during this experiment?
I try to get 60-120 min/week (walking mostly, cycling, lifting). I wanted the focus to be diet, so I have tried not to do too much with exercise.
6. What made you want to do this experiment? What do you hope this proves? Is weight and health management really only about the calories and nothing else?
Yes, one aspect is to see what happens when foods reported to be linked to obesity and reported to increase LDL and triglycerides and decrease HDL actually do that when consumed as part of an energy deficit diet–are data being taken out of context? Seems similar to saturated fat and low carb/high protein/high fat.
Also, with the push to reverse the “obesity epidemic” as some state, does it matter how we do it? If so, is it the epidemic that is important or the behaviors we engage in? Or, is the path to “health” more important than the outcomes? The questions and criticisms I have received are probably not much different than those raised to yourself, Dr. Volek, etc. Namely, the statements tend to speculate that I am ruining my liver/pancreas, with no evidence to support or refute that.
However, I am not aware of NASH/NAFLD being present as part of an energy deficit diet with concomitant decreases in body fat, blood lipids, and blood glucose. That does not mean my liver is healthy (I just had more blood work done, so I should get a better picture in the next day or so). That criticism seems similar to the notion that low carbohydrate diets are deleterious to the kidneys of healthy individuals.
So, on one hand I am personally addressing the obesity epidemic, yet my fat loss and improvements in cholesterol are occurring through “unhealthy” means. It is also interesting that my current diet is considered unhealthy, yet I was borderline hypercholesterolemic (TC>200, LDL>150, HDL<40, TC:HDL ratio>5.0) when I was eating few snack cakes. Now after eating boxes of Twinkies, Nutty Bars, and Zingers, the only risk factor present is HDL< mg/dl, which has increased (37-->39 mg/dl). Based on the outcomes, eating most of my energy via junk food seems to have improved my health–at least according to heart health equations (AHA/NCEP risk calculators).
You know, in a sense I get what Dr. Haub is saying about how too many people are quick to accept preconceived notions regarding diet and health. The moniker is put out there that “X” is unhealthy, so no matter what you had better not be consuming “X.” You fill in the blank. For people on a low-carb diet, we put “sugar” or “starch” in there while low-fat diet advocates put “meat” or “saturated fat.” But who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong when we are all individuals with varying nutritional needs? That’s not to say I’m 100% in favor of this “Little Debbie” diet but in the end as Dr. Haub says “does it really matter how we do it?”
This has been a theme I’ve been harping on since I started my blog and I’ll continue to hammer it hard–find a plan that will work for you, follow that plan exactly, and then keep doing it for the rest of your life. If you can find improvements in your lipids and blood sugar control while managing your weight consuming a diet of mostly Little Debbie snack cakes, then more power to ya! But some of us need to watch our carbohydrate intake very closely in order to keep all of those numbers in line and that’s kinda the end-around point that I think Dr. Haub was trying to make with this attention-grabbing experiment.
Although this was merely an n=1 non-scientific observational study, I do think this “Little Debbie” diet served a good purpose inasmuch as it forces people to think about why such a diet could be considered less than ideal even despite seeing improvements in health. It’s similar to what my buddy Tom Naughton did with his FAT HEAD documentary where he ate fast food for every meal for a month and saw similar weight loss and health improvements. While I wouldn’t recommend you go out and try what Dr. Haub did during his temporary diet experiment for yourself, I certainly encourage you to latch on to a plan that will keep your satisfied, healthy, and lean. That’s what healthy high-fat, moderate protein, low-carb living has done for me!
If you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Mark Haub’s “Little Debbie” diet, then be sure to check out the columns about it published in The Kansas State Collegian and The Toronto Star. And you can e-mail Dr. Haub at haub@k-state.edu to ask him further questions about his experiment.
