in #CASE you were curious about: Twinkies
Today is National Hostess Twinkie Day! This isn’t an “official” holiday, but does it really need to be? Marketed as a “Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling,” they were originally called Little Shortcake Fingers, and renamed Twinkie Fingers, before finally becoming “Twinkies.”
Twinkies were invented in Schiller Park, Illinois, by James Alexander Dewar, a baker for the Continental Baking Company in 1930. Since there were several machines that were used to make the cream-filled strawberry shortcake that was being used during the off-strawberry season, Dewar decided to fill a snack cake with banana cream.
During World War II, bananas were rationed and the company was forced to switch to vanilla cream, which is what remains. After the war was over and bananas were more readily available, they didn’t switch back because people liked the vanilla cream better.
Sure, there are jokes about Twinkies lasting forever, but they’re only “good” for about 25 days...but have an actual shelf-life of 45 days.
In the 1980s, Hostess tried to introduce a strawberry cream filled Twinkie, but this was unsuccessful.
In 2006, Hostess briefly brought back the banana filled Twinkie as part of a promotion for the release of King Kong on DVD.
Among those artificial ingredients in Twinkies is cellulose gum, which gives Twinkie cream its smooth feel.
According to Hostess, it takes about 45 seconds to explode a Twinkie in a standard powered microwave.
The Twinkies eaten in “Zombieland” were not real Twinkies. Being a vegan and raw-foodist, Woody Harrelson would not eat real Twinkies. Rather, the “Twinkies” he was shown eating were made from cornmeal and were vegan-safe.
Nutritionist Mark Haub once went on a “Twinkie Diet” in order to see if one could eat almost nothing, but junk food, and still lose weight (testing his theory that weight loss is primarily tied to calorie intake, rather than what foods you eat). He stuck to an 1,800 calorie per day diet of mostly Twinkies, Donuts, Doritos, Oreos, and sugary cereals (though did drink a protein shake and took a multivitamin). In the end, his body mass index dropped from 28.8 to 24.9 and he lost 27 pounds in the 2 months he stuck to the diet, dropping from 201 pounds to 174 pounds. What surprised him, as he’d expected the weight loss from his theory, was that his “bad” cholesterol levels dropped 20% over his normal healthy diet and his “good” cholesterol levels increased by 20%. He even dropped 39% on his “bad” fat levels, such as triglycerides.