Having a hard time understanding why breakfast is the one meal of day that you should not eat toast, bagels, muffins, waffles, pancakes, cereal, biscuits, bread or grits? Here’s why. When you eat foods that are rich in fiber, fat and protein, it takes your body a while to break them down. They get absorbed into your bloodstream very slowly. But whenever you eat foods (or food-like products) made primarily from sugar or stripped flour, it’s easy for your digestive system to break down the ingredients. That’s because much of the work has already been done. The faster you absorb food, the more insulin your body needs to release to 1) catch the food and 2) escort it to the cells of your body. Insulin doesn’t work very efficiently in the morning. Especially if you are stressed out because, among other things, you didn’t get enough sleep. If you need an alarm clock to wake up, you didn’t. But you’re not alone. 

     Imagine you have two cars in your garage. One is a Ford F-150 truck, and the other is a Volkswagen. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that due to atmospheric conditions, gasoline doesn’t work as efficiently in the morning. That’s not really true, of course. I’m just saying it to set up a teaching point. All things being equal, and assuming that gasoline works inefficiently at daybreak, which vehicle are you going to choose to drive your kid to school tomorrow morning? The Volkswagen, of course! Does this mean you’re never going to drive your Ford truck? No. But, generally speaking, you’re not going to drive it in the morning — you’d just be wasting gas. Most of the time you’ll drive the Volkswagen. Unless you have a really good reason why not. Like the Volkswagen is in the shop for a tune-up. 

     So just like it doesn’t make sense to waste your gasoline by driving a gas-guzzler first thing, it doesn’t make sense to waste your insulin by eating rapidly-absorbed food for breakfast. I’m not saying that you can never eat white flour. I am saying not to eat white bread for breakfast. It’s okay to eat a slice of whole grain toast or pancakes, but nothing made from white flour. Have a bowl of cereal for dessert, after lunch. But not for breakfast.

      Diabetics, please note that your blood sugars may be too sensitive to tolerate white flour any time. You can tell by checking your blood sugars 90 minutes after you eat. If your blood sugars are back in the normal range by then, your choice was okay. If they have not yet recovered from the rise associated with eating, your insulin supply was insufficient to manage all the incoming stripped carb in that meal. 

     You can also think about it this way. Eating stripped carbohydrates (like white flour and sugar, both of which have had all the color and fiber stripped out of them) is like hitting a man when he’s already down. Stripped carbohydrates stress out your insulin-production system. Why stress your insulin production right out of the gate, first thing in the morning? Pretend that it takes a gallon of insulin to eat a bowl of cereal. If you eat that cereal for breakfast, you’ll have used up almost your entire supply before you’ve even started your day. You don’t have a gallon of insulin to waste. It just doesn’t make sense to eat stripped carbs for breakfast.

      Well, you might ask, how did they get to be typical breakfast foods? And that is a topic for another day.