The McDonald's Diet

New Years often brings dieting resolutions to mind, so this USA Today story caught our eye: Eat McDonald's for Three Months, Lose 37 Pounds?

A high school science teacher in the Colo-Nesco School District in Colo, Iowa, says he lost 37 pounds in 90 days also by eating only McDonald's food — but he followed strict nutritional limits laid out by his students. That included limits of 2,000 calories a day and attempts to stick with daily recommended allowances for protein, carbohydrates, cholesterol and several other nutritional restrictions.

His mission was "to demonstrate to his students that it's how and what you eat — not where you eat — that matters most. During the three months, he says, his cholesterol dropped from 249 to 170."

"I'm the perfect example of a slob," says the teacher, John Cisna, in a phone interview on Monday. He insists that he ate a variety of stuff on the McDonald's menu — including Big Macs, Quarter Pounders and even desserts, including sundaes and ice cream cones.

He had two Egg White Delight McMuffins, a bowl of McDonald's Fruit & Maple Oatmeal and 1% milk for breakfast and, typically, a salad for lunch. Then, at dinner, he'd often have a more traditional Value Meal. He also adopted a new exercise regimen of walking 45 minutes daily.

McDonalds seemed pleased with the results. And Morgan Spurlock — the director of the film Super Size Me that a decade ago "skewered McDonald's for selling food that the hit documentary film claimed was not healthy..." — was not available for comment.

About that New Year's Dieting Resolution...

If you're one who follows Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations with a New Year's resolution to shed a few pounds, you might want to avoid the USDA's dietary guidelines. Cameron English explains:

While blaming lack of exercise, overeating, and (this week) poor parenting, the real culprit has been almost entirely overlooked: The awful dietary advice dispensed by mainstream medical science over the last 30 years. If we want a healthier, slimmer population, we have to stop eating the sugar-laden diet so many experts have recommended to us.

The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) dietary guidelines are the gold standard for healthy eating, according to most experts. The problem is that these recommendations promote a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on grains like bread and rice. These kinds of foods consist almost entirely of carbohydrates. When you digest carbohydrates, they are converted into sugar in your bloodstream, the same sugar found in ice cream, soda, potato chips, and all the other junk foods most people would recognize as unhealthy. Since high blood sugar is toxic, your body produces a hormone called insulin to bring it down to a reasonable level. The trouble with this, however, is that insulin brings down your blood sugar by converting it to fat and sending it into your fat cells to be stored. There are many problems with this process...