Category Archives: Breakfast

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Muffin-y Goodness

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Of course, this is an especially good week for an egg recipe…

My sister saw a recipe for these beauties last week, and now you should try them! I love the idea of eating a few for breakfast, taking some for lunch, popping one or two for a mid-afternoon snack, and then making a whole new batch. But maybe not all on the same day.

My advice? Use eggs with the brightest orange-yellow yolks, berries with deepest warmest color, and the sweetest, ripest bananas you can find. You can’t possibly go wrong! Continue reading →

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Sharon’s Sweet-Potato Oatcakes

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This week I have an amazing new recipe from my friend, Sharon, who was so pleased with it that she decided to send it along to share with us! I am thrilled to be able to post it for you today, because I imagine that you are going to love it, too! I doubled her recipe to give you a few extra to share or save for breakfast tomorrow. Thank you, Sharon! Continue reading →

Breakfast Candy

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Let’s talk about breakfast cereals, shall we? Developed by a couple of enterprising health spa owners from Battle Creek, Michigan, they originally provided an economical use for the crumbs that fell to the bottom of the bread ovens. The word “cereal,” which simply means grain, comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Breakfast cereal? That’s a marketing term. Continue reading →

YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Apple-Walnut Oatmeal

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In view of the fact that I’ve been asked yet again to repost this recipe, and since it’s autumn (the most glorious autumn I can remember in at least a few years) I am reposting this recipe for Apple-Walnut Oatmeal. You will be pleased to note that I adjusted the proportions so you can make enough for two. Continue reading →

Breakfasts for Kids and Their Loving Parents

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I was talking with a dear friend who teaches in the younger grades at a small school north of Detroit. “The kids are bouncing off the walls by 9:30,” my friend says, and I think to myself that maybe their blood sugars are starting to fall. Nine-thirty in the morning is pretty early. He says that a snack often helps. Yup — it very well may be their blood sugars. Continue reading →

The Real Meaning of “Breakfast Cereal”

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Let’s talk about something I said a few weeks ago: It started with the term “breakfast cereal.” I put it in quotes for reasons that I’ll get to below. I also made the point that the term “breakfast cereal” reminds me of phrases like “TV dinners,” and “Lunchables,” whatever that means. Whenever marketers tell me what to eat and when to eat it, that’s a very bad sign. Actually it’s more of a clue. And that’s the subject of today’s post. Continue reading →

I Drink 2 Pots of Coffee and I Don’t Do Breakfast

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Originally posted 12/12/2010

When I was home for Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago, I got to spend time not only with my family, but also with some old friends I hadn’t seen for a long time.  This week’s mail brought some interesting questions from one of those old friends, who gave me permission to share them with you.

Dan wrote that he does not normally eat breakfast.  He’s not that hungry early in the morning.  He does, however, drink copious amounts of coffee.  He described himself as “very overweight,” and said that he’s considering going on a “very low carb diet” to drop the weight.  I asked exactly how much coffee he’s talking about, and he said close to 2 pots of coffee a day (7-8 mugs).  He adds only half-and-half.  No sweeteners.

Here’s what I say about skipping breakfast: Our bodies need a certain amount of energy to get through the day.  If we have not eaten that amount of energy (calories) by the time we get up from the dinner table, we will eat the rest AFTER dinner.  By and large, calories eaten after dinner are snacks, so they are not as nutritious as meals.  Also, the later you eat them, the less likely it is that they will be completely digested by the time you go to bed.  And then you aren’t hungry when you wake up.  So you skip breakfast.  Vicious cycle.

The way to put an end to this is to eat protein in the morning.  It sends a message to your body to turn on your daytime metabolism.  It doesn’t have to be King Henry VIII’s breakfast.  Just a cheese stick.  A hard-boiled egg, a leftover hamburger.  No time?  Eat a handful of nuts in the car on the way to work.

Now the coffee.  Dan said each 12-cup pot of coffee makes 4 mugs of coffee, and that he doesn’t quite finish the second pot.  So figure each mug is around 2 1/2 cups.  I have a couple of mugs that big around here.  American-sized.  One tablespoon of cream?  Yeh, right!   Let’s assume Dan puts 4 tablespoons of half-and-half in each mug of coffee.  If each tablespoon contains 2 1/2 grams of fat and 25 calories, Dan is drinking 700 calories of half-and-half every day.  Even though the fat is more nutritious than you might think, there’s no two ways about it: that’s a lot of food.  I’m guessing he eats at least a couple of meals, plus snacks, in addition.

One thing he could do would be to put cream in just the first cup or two of the morning, and drink it black for the rest of the day.  And remember to have a high-protein breakfast.   Or he could admit that he’s drinking one-and-a-half to two meals worth of calories a day, and factor that into what he chooses for lunch.  Celery?

Now to answer the very-low-carb diet question.  Do I recommend it?  No, I don’t.  At least not yet.  I don’t believe in sudden change.  I say he should take a careful look at the rest of his diet, and figure out the single largest source of processed carbohydrate – be it white flour, chips, high fructose corn syrup, or sugar.

His pants will get loose pretty fast once he identifies and decreases the amount of processed carbohydrate in his diet.  He doesn’t need to do it all at once.  He can pick one problem at a time, and see what happens.  Two or three months of eating peppers and cucumbers with lunch, instead of chips, would be a great start.  If he becomes a breakfast eater, a nutritious, high-protein breakfast instead of Frosty Crunchos would be a very good idea.  The best answer depends on the the biggest problem.  Soda/pop every afternoon?  Donuts?  The drive-thru for a sausage-on-the-go-go every morning?  Everybody has different issues.  At least we know Dan’s not ordering the extra-large sweet latte made with non-dairy whitener.

Next week (posted 12/19/2010) , we’ll be talking about another set of questions from Emily, who’s working on following Weight Watchers and my “Four Recommendations” at the same time.

Don’t Eat Bread for Breakfast

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     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 refined (stripped) flour, your digestive system breaks down the ingredients and absorbs them very quickly. The faster you absorb food, the more insulin your body has to release to catch the food and escort it to the cells throughout your body. Now it’s important to remember that insulin doesn’t work very efficiently in the early morning hours. In the early morning hours, we are all somewhat resistant to the effects of insulin. Naturally. All of us. Believe me — you’re not alone. 

     Think of it like this: Let’s pretend that you have two cars in your garage. One is a Ford F-150 truck, and the other is a Volkswagen. And now 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. So…back to the garage. Now, 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 you’re not going to drive it in the morning —  you’d just be wasting your gasoline. Most of the time you’ll drive the Volkswagen. Unless you have some really good reason why not. Like you want to impress your kid. Or the Volkswagen is in for a tune-up. 

     Now, just like it doesn’t make sense to waste the gasoline in this story by driving a gas-guzzler first thing in the day, 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 you can’t eat it for breakfast. It’s okay to eat a slice of toast, or a bagel, or pancakes for lunch, or for dinner. (As long as your blood sugars can handle it: Folks with diabetics, please take note!) Or to have a bowl of cereal for dessert, after lunch. But not for breakfast.

     Here’s another way to think about it. Eating stripped carbohydrates (like white flour and sugar, both of which have had all the color and fiber stripped out of them) first thing in the morning is like hitting a man when he’s already down. Stripped carbohydrates stress out your insulin-production system. Why stress your insulin production at the one time of day when it works least efficiently? Imagine that it takes a gallon of insulin to eat a bowl of cereal. But if you eat that cereal at breakfast time, it will take a gallon and a half. And you don’t have a gallon of insulin to waste in the first place! It just doesn’t make sense to eat stripped carbs for breakfast. Well then, you might ask, how did they get to be typical breakfast foods? And that is a topic for another day.