Mark Haub

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Interview with 'Twinkie Diet Professor,' Dr. Mark Haub. A long-form (2+ hour) interview covering his entire career.

Uses Haub's data to argue for the primacy of energy balance in weight loss.

The program curriculum focuses on a series of core leadership competencies and three complementary threads: individual leadership; leading change within organizations; and understanding and influencing complex food systems. This curriculum lays the groundwork for leaders who will transition food systems research, education, and outreach to broader, more holistic approaches. FSLI is a program of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. North Carolina State University is the primary host institution, responsible for program implementation and hosting FSLI scholars during one of their three onsite residential sessions. The Ohio State University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo are also partners in the FSLI, providing their expertise in leadership and food systems to the FSLI curriculum and hosting onsite residential sessions for FSLI participants.

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Focuses on the "calories in vs. calories out" debate sparked by his results. "When I tell people I’m on a high-carbohydrate diet, they give me a highly skeptical look, as if I just told them the moon landing was faked. From a pure weight-loss perspective, I could eat nothing but bacon-wrapped sticks of butter topped with chocolate-covered Froot Loops, and as long as I maintained a caloric deficit I would lose weight. This concept has been proved time and again, most recently by the Twinkie Guy. Twinkie Guy — also known as Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University — is the genius who lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks subsisting almost exclusively on Twinkies, Doritos, Oreos and other treats by ensuring that he consumed fewer calories than he burned."

Haub discusses the "health" implications of his cholesterol drop with host Scott Simon.

Analyzes the psychological aspect of "comfort cravings" vs. calorie restriction.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta visits with professor Mark Haub about his "Twinkie diet" experiment, in which he lost 27 pounds and 8 percent of his body fat. Plus, he'll take a look at fast-food kids meals, few of which meet nutritional guidelines. Watch "Sanjay Gupta MD," 7:30 a.m. ET on Saturday and Sunday.

Media coverage of a teaching demonstration by Kansas State University professor of human nutrition Mark Haub, later dubbed the "Twinkie diet," in which for about 10 weeks he ate mostly convenience-store snacks while keeping intake under ~1,800 calories to illustrate that energy balance drives weight loss. The demonstration generated national TV, radio, and major print/online coverage and a long-term public visibility "tail." Using the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) — a standard weighted count of online attention to a research output — the typical faculty article is strikingly low-attention, which is exactly what makes an outlier like Haub valuable. • The median faculty research article scores about AAS ≈ 2; in one 792-article oncology cohort, 27.5% received zero media attention at all. • Adding a press release raises media attention roughly ten-fold — a documented ~70-point average AAS lift in a controlled experiment. • Even the single highest-scoring article in that 792-article study reached AAS = 428. • Altmetric does not fully capture TV, radio, or print — precisely Haub’s dominant channels — so his true reach sits above what the score can even register and assumed at > 6000. Read conservatively: a typical faculty story scores ~2, a genuinely successful one ~70–100, the best-in-a-large-study 428 — and a national-broadcast viral demonstration sits an order of magnitude beyond even that. The gap between “good” and “viral” is measured in multiples of 100×. Bottom line: faculty who become well-known through their scholarship and teaching can deliver institutional value — reach, brand, recruitment pull, partnerships — that traditional metrics render invisible. Measured transparently, that value is real, large, and worth cultivating. Sources & method: Episode facts from 2010–2026 reporting (CNN, NPR, ABC/Good Morning America, CBS, LA Times, and later explainers) and KSU communications. Benchmarks from published Altmetric Attention Score distributions and press-release lift studies. Dollar and impression figures ($150,000 to $550,000) are labeled illustrative and method-disclosed; they are directional, not audited.

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Selected by FHSU administration and foundation. This university award is limited to 1 -2 alumni per year.

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