Professor Risks Health For Diet Myth
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You have seen me say it again and again: If you want to lose weight, you simply need to eat less calories than you burn.
The Issues Surrounding Weight
But I’m not the only one who would like to tear his hair out over the neverending claims that this or that has to be eliminated from your diet for you to lose weight. Mark Haub, professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, wants to show in a self-experiment that you can lose weight by only eating junk food. He told food-navigator-usa.com:
“The purpose is to illustrate metabolic, mental and sociological issues surrounding weight. The principle is simple: eat fewer kilocalories than I expend”.
According to AOL News for the month after finishing this endeavor he plans to gain weight by only eating foods deemed as healthy, to challenge the idea of “junk food vs. health food”. Which is just as well, as a while ago I read a report by British authority Lacors that found children in kindergartens are fed so many whole grains, vegetables and fruits and so much fiber that they hardly get enough fat and calories – you can have too much of a good thing.
All I can therefore say is: More power to Professor Haub. There would be a lot less obesity and ill-led “healthy living” if there was more understanding about how nutrition works.
You can find an exclusive follow-up interview with Prof. Haub here.
Thanks to Jess, whose blog on nutrition led me to discover Prof. Haub’s undertaking.
10 Comments
The no fail twinkie diet. You eat too few you loose weight. Eat to many and well they taste great right?
You know what’s funny? Before I went to the US this May I thought when I got there I would finally have a Twinkie – the junk food that even has websites dedicated to it. And then I forgot about it! Argh!
Well you can come to Canada to. We have them here 😉
I’m curious to see how this turns out ^_^ This sounds like a great experiment!
Yep, me, too. Hopefully we will see follow-ups on it.
People are very misinformed about how to lose weight. They are also not informed about proper portion size. We eat like sows in the US. If anyone has ever traveled abroad and thought, “Wow, this is really a tiny piece of meat! This is dinner” Um, yeah, that is probably the we should be eating here in the land of excess.
Can’t wait to read more. And thanks for your comments.
Hope you’ll visit me at “Lessons From Teachers and Twits”
http://rasjacobson.wordpress.com
(I’m the chief twit.)
Well, the big question is: How much of it is the sow’s fault?
Yeah I’m kinda ticked off about the fact that they only have low-fat milk at kindergartens in Sweden now. I mean, regular milk is much better, more flavor, and they’re in kindergarten! At a 5-year olds only department where I worked, we had a kid who was really overweight.
Is the low-fat milk gonna counteract his parents feeding him pizza & Mcdonalds all the time? Hells no. Even though he was forced to eat more vegetables than the other kids, he didn’t loose weight. It wasn’t until his parents got their heads out of their asses (they had been warned since he was 3, and he was one miserable kid, mood-swings, aggression problems etc), nothing changed.
2 weeks after his parents changed his diet, he started asking for vegetables, and was much happier, mood swings & aggression went down.
Lesson from the story? Some parents you just want to punch in the mouth, and until you do so (verbally), you can feed kids nothing but water & vegetables at kindergarten. The overweight kids will still be overweight, but the normal kids will be malnourished.
I agree: The nutritional needs of an overweight kid are different from those of the lanky boy sitting beside him. Giving them all the same is shortsighted.
However, just as you say, all this meaning well leads nowhere, when the environment children spend most their time in, home, basically counteracts it.
Rumor has it you are doing an important interview soon, when can we expect it???