The Twinkie Defense Gets Thinner

Remember a number of years ago when a man on trial for a criminal offense offered what has since been termed “the twinkie defense”–i.e., that he was driving to commit his crime by eating sugar-laden twinkies?

Well, twinkies not only may not be a good defense in court, they also may not be a good defense for being overweight as a teenager.

A recent Harvard study finds lack of correlation between snack food consumption and obesity in teens.

This flies in the face of traditional diet “wisdom” that snack foods are uniformly bad for you and are to be avoided in preference for other sugar/starch/carbohydrate-laden “healthy” foods like fruit, bread, and pasta.

The study has some sharp limitations, which make it difficult to draw significant dieting advice from it (i.e., it wasn’t fine-grained enough to identify specific eating habits that produced desirable weights among teens vs. specific eating habits that produced undesirable ones), but it did appear to show two things that cohere quite well with the diet strategy I am personally convinced of:

1) Except in one particular group (see next point), eating so-called “snack foods” or “junk foods” do not appear to cause more obesity than eating allegedly “healthy” foods (i.e., foods judged healthy by the United States Department of Agriculture‘s give-your-children-diabetes-while-helping-us-sell-more-grain-based-products food pyramid).

2) In one particular group–those who had overweight parents–consumption of “snack foods” was correlated with obesity, suggesting that obesity may be in significant measure a product of genetics. This could be in part due to eating habits passed on from parents to kids in the home environment, so separated twin studies would need to be done to show how much of it is due to genetics, but any time you have a physical trait (like obesity) running in a family, there is a good chance that it is in part genetic.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin