CNN - Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds???

Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.

I have heard about a lot of weird  diets before but the most absurd turns to be this so called TWINKIE DIET!!!!

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months.
For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.
His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.
But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.
Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

Despite his temporary success, Haub does not recommend replicating his snack-centric diet.
"I'm not geared to say this is a good thing to do," he said. "I'm stuck in the middle. I guess that's the frustrating part. I can't give a concrete answer. There's not enough information to do that."
Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

It sounds so simple, but yet most people don't get it when it comes to weight loss. You could eat nothing but doughnuts everyday and still lose weight, provided that the calories of lard that you are taking in are fewer than the calories you'd taken before your nasty doughnut diet. By this experiment we get to see the absurdity of fad diets.  The Cookie Diet, or Atkins, or whatever new fad diet isn't unlocking some magical weight loss secret. If you lose weight on one of those horrid plans, it's almost certainly because you are eating fewer calories. 

The second aspect of the Twinkie Diet experiment revolves around the fact that certain health markers improved for Professor Haub. This immediately caused some to say that you can eat all the junk food you want and you don’t need to worry about anything as long as you’re eating the right amount of calories. Of course HDL and LDL can be influenced in a rather short time and that doesn't mean this is a healthy way to maintain weight loss. I wonder what he'll eat now that his diet is over??

I think that it’s too early jump to any conclusions. No study is done on a single person. For any claims to be substantiated, you have to study a large group of people and come to a statistical revelant analysis of them all.
In the case of Professor Haub you need to remember that this was a short experiement so nothing is known about the long term effects of a junk food diet on your body’s tendency to develop any number of disease and illnesses. In addition, Haub wasn’t given a full array of tests for possible conditions so while some of his markers have improved, it is possible that others worsened.