The Fat Diaries: Rush Limbaugh's Sugar Diet
Like most people, I’ve wondered how much government needs to do to fight the obesity crisis and how much responsibility should be left to the public. Enter Rush Limbaugh. If I was on the fence before, this guy is enough to make me want to climb into Michelle Obama’s lap and ask for a bowl of home-grown salad.
On a recent show, Rush felt the need to summarize an article on nutrition. The article was concerning a dietary experiment performed by Professor Kevin Haub. For ten weeks the Kansas State professor ate nothing but convenience store food, like Doritos, Oreos, Twinkies, and other junk. The experiment was to see if, when limiting his daily calorie intake from 2,600 to 1,800, Prof. Kevin would somehow manage to lose weight regardless of the kinds of calories they were.
Well, he did in fact lose weight, he lost 27 pounds. I groaned… physically. This is exactly the nonsense that we don’t need when trying to convince schools that our kids shouldn’t be eating french fries five times a week. And good ol’ Rush decided to run with it.
What have I told you about diet and exercise? Exercise is irrelevant. What matters in losing weight is what you eat, pure and simple, and how much, nothing more than that. And everybody tries to tell me I’m wrong, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And every time a story comes out on this I am validated, and nobody has ever said, 'Rush, you know, you were right about this.'
Sorry to say it, but Rush, you were wrong about this. Not about the 27 pounds, Prof. Haub really did go from 201 to 174, but the pundit conveniently omitted that the professor also ate green-beans, celery stalks, protein shakes and a hefty multivitamin. I did wonder about that. How was the professor getting protein or any form of fiber? How could anyone function on soley sugar and phosphates, let alone manage a good bowel movement? He needed more than snack cakes and chips to achieve that.
Rush also missed the professor’s comments after the fact. There were some early indicators of better health that meant, short term, that losing the weight was a good thing. But what about long term? Would his blood sugar have risen? His cholesterol level went down, but what about his blood pressure from all the sodium? Was any weight loss due to decreased muscle mass? Would he have suffered from malnutrition? And of course his teeth would be a mess if he consumed that much sugar over ten years as opposed to ten weeks.
Professor Haub himself decided, after his final results not to continue with his Twinkie-diet, but to instead eat a balanced calorie-controlled diet.
I’m not geared to say this is a good thing to do…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.
What I find the most interesting part was that, inadvertently or not, Prof. Haub challenged the BMI index. When Haub started, his BMI was 28.8 which qualifies as overweight (read: uninsurable). After he lost the 27 lbs, Haub was at a BMI of 24.9 which puts him in the “normal” range. But was he really any healthier? I’ve been saying for ages that the BMI is outmoded, yet insurance companies and doctors still swear by it? Would my doctors really be happier if I met their artificial weight goal by taking up this Twinkie diet regardless of the danger to my health?
Well, Rush can eat Twinkies till he bleeds marshmallow cream if that’s his prerogative. He’s gone through enough rapid weight changes in his life to do whatever the hell he wants. I much prefer to go my own plodding pace. And if one person tells me I’m wasting my time because there was “some guy” who ate a bunch of snack cakes and he lost weight I’m going to say. “He can do what’s good for him. I’ll do what’s good for me.” And honestly, I don’t care for Twinkies.
