Week 17: One Meal at a Time, Sweet Jesus

There is also this "One Day At A Time"While I am referencing the gospel song "One Day At A Time," each of us must do things one day at a time, and in terms of health, one meal at a time. So let's begin with breakfast, the supposed king of meals. As the old saying goes, "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." As in most of these folk wisdom sayings, I am not convinced this is so.

I think that not eating breakfast is a perfectly acceptable option, although I admit the scientific consensus is against it.

An article in the Washington Post discusses this: 

At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes, and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was ... the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.

“In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from Columbia University concluded in a paper published last year.

The first study mentioned is not a very good study. From personal experience, a cereal for breakfast is not a good option for me unless I doctor the oatmeal up with protein and fat. I am sure the oatmeal and cereal were both served with "healthy" skim milk.  What this may mean is that the people involved in the study might have had thier blood sugar drop later and cause hunger. (Note that I will discuss the oatmeal breakfast option next.)

This article continues:

This year, as the Dietary Guidelines are being updated, the credibility of its nutritional commandments has been called into question by a series of scientific disputes. Its advisory committee called for dropping the longstanding warning about dietary cholesterol, which had long plagued the egg industry; prominent studies contradicted the government warnings about the dangers of salt; and the government’s longstanding condemnation of foods rich in saturated fats seems simplistic, according to critics, given the ever more intricate understanding of the nutrition in fatty foods.

The studies that led to the recommendation that you eat breakfast are observational studies. The Post explains:

Observational studies in nutrition are generally cheaper and easier to conduct. But they can suffer from weaknesses that can lead scientists astray.

One of the primary troubles in observational studies is what scientists refer to as “confounders” — basically, unaccounted factors that can lead researchers to make mistaken assumptions about causes. For example, suppose breakfast skippers have a personality trait that makes them more likely to gain weight than breakfast eaters. If that’s the case, it may look as if skipping breakfast causes weight gain even though the cause is the personality trait.

That personality trait might consist of skipping breakfast, going to work, and then at 10 going to get some coffee and noticing the donuts in the break room... 

How then will you know if skipping breakfast, or any of the other suggestions I will make, is good for you? Try it and see. If you skip breakfast and find yourself able to go to lunch without a donut or Snickers bar, and still eat a healthy lunch, then skipping breakfast might be for you.

Having cereal for breakfast is somewhat risky for many people. I am one of them. If I have oatmeal for breakfast, at 11 I will be ravenously hungry because the sudden influx of carbohydrates causes my body to overreact, and I over produce insulin and can become ill. I first noticed this at age 20 when my donut and coffee breakfast as a college student caused me to become ill, sweaty, and ravenously hungry at 11 after a morning class. To a degree this is just simply biology, and it is why many do so well on 6 meals a day as their blood sugar is dropping after carbohydrates.

Here is one doctor's recommendation:

Oatmeal is interesting because, while it is a healthy food choice, it actually has a pretty high glycemic index, meaning it could cause a spike in blood sugar. However, how you eat oatmeal could determine how much of a spike it could cause.

For instance, if you add a teaspoon of sugar or some honey to a bowl of oatmeal, the glycemic index will skyrocket and it will trigger an even greater spike in blood sugar levels. If, however, you add a tablespoon of butter and some cinnamon, it has less effect on blood sugar levels.

But even with these issues I have had some success with oatmeal if I eat it with normal milk for the additional, fat and add some soy protein powder to the oatmeal. Yes, I tended to eat lunch earlier than with other breakfasts, but this was not a big issue at the time for me. Will this work for you? Try it and see.

(As an aside, if you are a man over 40 you should seriously consider adding at least one capful of soy powder to your diet every day. This will help your prostate not grow as fast or as large. It will also reduce your PSA test results. I cannot recommend this highly enough.) 

Another breakfast option is the traditional bacon and eggs. But as I pointed out in a previous post, this tradition was more of an advertising and PR victory than an actual tradition. I have also had success with this while I was gradually losing weight. I had one piece of low carb toast, two poached eggs, and beef bacon most mornings. As I mentioned two weeks ago, this bread was low carb but high in gluten, not a good choice for me. 

For variety I often had low carb oatmeal. Guess what? It was high in gluten as well. If you have not yet started removing gluten as an experiment, it is not too late to start now. But back to bacon and eggs. I had this for months as my main breakfast, and my cholesterol dropped 40 points as I lost weight. This is another reason why you should be testing your blood lipids and other factors regularly, as I discussed in a previous week.  Why do I use poached eggs? I like them better and the additional bonus is that there is no fat that is used in their preparation. Why do I use beef bacon? I do not eat pork for religious reasons. How will you know if a traditional bacon and egg breakfast will work for you? Try it and see.

I tried a version of this recently where I ate smoked salmon and poached eggs most mornings. It did not work as salmon is one food that those with a history of gout should not overdo. Yes, I had a flare-up. My point in bringing this up is to remind us all once again, we are all different, what works for you might not work for me, and what works for you at 30 might not work at 60. Try it and see.

Another popular health idea is that one should only eat fruit for breakfast. One would think that this would result in an even greater blood sugar rush than cereal, but it does not. This is due to the way that the body digests fructose. I have talked about this before.  Basically the fructose does not impact blood sugar but is instead transported by the body to the liver and directly transformed into fat--this is one source of triglycerides. High triglycerides levels are very unhealthy.  

Does this mean that one should not eat fruit? Not necessarily. If you eat a low fat diet, then yes the fructose will result in one having more fat in the diet than one realizes, but in the total context of the total diet this does not have to be bad.  I recommend that a women eats one or two servings and a man two or three servings of fruit in a a day. So a fruit breakfast might fit right into your diet. I did this for a number of years, but it had zero effect on my other health practices so it did not work well for me. I would get 21 servings of fruit at the store, not that a banana is two servings, and I would prepare a week's worth of breakfasts at once. I would cut all the fruit up and add some nuts and divide it into 7 portions and freeze them and voila, breakfast for the week was done!  All I had to do was defrost one container in the refrigerator the night before. You might not need to be so, well, anal about your breakfast fruit, but I found this helpful. Will breakfast fruit work for you? Try it and see.

Another option is to have nontraditional breakfast foods, as my mother used to say, "Have lunch for breakfast." My mother often had lintel soup for breakfast.  I have never found this a satisfying idea, but you might like it. 

What I have finally settled on for me for breakfast is yogurt and fruit with some nuts. I take 2/3 to 1 cup of frozen fruit, usually berries, and microwave them for one minute. The purpose of this is not to warm them up so much but to have them release juice. I then take this and add 1/4 cup of nuts and one cup of yogurt and mix them up. I find it very satisfying.

I am sure that each of these brands have normal unsweetened yogurt, buy them instead. One important note is the kind of yogurt you select. Most modern yogurts are so processed and sugar-laden that they are really not healthy anymore. Take a container of plain yogurt at the store and look at the label, then compare it to one of the processed yogurts that most people eat. You will see a dramatic difference in ingredients. I use unsweetened vanilla coconut yogurt; but normal yogurt or Greek yogurt is another viable option. Just get the real stuff, not something supposedly improved by the agribusiness industry. Try it and see.

I am never going to give you meal plans where I tell you what to eat. I don't know you or your metabolism. You do. If you are smart enough to read this blog, you are smart enough to experiment and see what works for you.

Which breakfast should you eat?

Try them and see.

Here is your homework:

If you are eating a low fat diet then the amount of fruit you eat can be higher. 

Don't have time for breakfast? Are you sure?