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
Category Archives: Breakfast
I Drink 2 Pots of Coffee and I Don’t Do Breakfast
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
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.
More on Breakfast Candy
Nov 10 2009
Last week I posted an entry about breakfast cereal or, in my humble opinion, breakfast candy. In the 1970’s, concerns were raised about the sugar content in breakfast cereals. The rational response would have been to lower the sugar content. But that’s not what happened. Instead, attention was directed to removing the word “sugar” from the names of the products. The concept of sweetness was preserved without using the actual word. Across the land, the word “sugar” on the cereal boxes was replaced with “honey,” “frosted,” “golden,” “sprinkles,” and “cocoa.” Sugar Smacks became Honey Smacks, and Sugar Crisp became Golden Crisp. Sugar Bear became Super Bear; even Mascots, a powerful marketing tool in and of themselves, received new names. Otherwise, the industry continued to use the same recipes to manufacture cereals that appealed to children and the sugar-saturated American palate. With time, new markets were established as children grew into adults who had developed a taste for the sweet stuff in their own childhoods.
Here is a list of selected breakfast cereals straight from the shelves at my local supermarket. If you didn’t know this was a list of breakfast cereals, you might think it was a list of offerings at the local bakery or candy shop. Note the overt references to foods we typically consider dessert: Chocolate Chip Cookie Crisp, Vanilla Wafer Cookie Crisp, Oatmeal Cookie Crisp, Double Chocolate Cookie Crisp, Cookie Crisp Sprinkles, Honey Bunches of Oats, Honey Nut Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Pebbles, Smore’s Crunch, Smore’s Grahams, Honey Smacks, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Golden Grahams, Cinnamon Life Cereal, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Frosted Flakes, Super Sugar Crisp (also called Golden Crisp, Super Crisp, Honey Crisp), Honey Nut O’s, Honeycomb, Honey Nut Clusters, Honey Graham Marshmallows, Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, Lucky Charms (they’re magically delicious!). And the frooty (Close your eyes and say “fruit.”) products: Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, Froot Loops, Raisin Bran (one of the higher sugar cereals on the market), Fruity Pebbles, Frankenberry, Boo Berry, Apple Jacks.
Are there any nutritious cereals? In November 2008, Consumer Reports rated 23 of the top 27 cereals marketed to children as only Good or Fair for nutrition. Eleven of the 23 cereals they tested contained as much sugar as a glazed Dunkin’ doughnut.
What about Cheerios? Cheerios is an interesting example of the problem. It’s billed as a whole-grain product, and the first ingredient in Cheerios (originally Cheery-oats) is, indeed, whole oats. The next ingredient, however, is food starch. The third ingredient is modified food starch. This means that there is probably as much, if not more, food starch in Cheerios as there is whole grain. Food starch is usually derived from wheat or corn, whichever is cheaper at the time of purchase. What is starch? Starch is a simple chain of rapidly digested sugar molecules. Throughout history it has been used as a thickener, or stiffening or gluing agent. It’s used extensively in processed foods and is, for obvious reasons, a frequent cause of constipation. Since it spikes blood sugars, I don’t buy it.
I’d like to discuss one more category of breakfast cereal, products that are marketed specifically to adults. Their names, Product 19, Fiber 1, Total, and Special K, are reminiscent not of candy but, rather, laboratories. Each has a vaguely scientific-sounding name, as if to buttress an argument that you should be eating the stuff because it’s scientifically proven to be good for you. But is it? Did they really reject 18 mixtures, all lined up in identical little ehrlenmeyer flasks, until they got to the 19th one, which turned out to be exactly the right mixture of ingredients to provide everything you need to start your day right? What’s so special about K? And what makes Fiber 1 first? All I know is that none of these has the staying power, or nutritional density, to hold me until lunchtime — four measly hours– without a midmorning snack.
So what are your options? Speaking from personal experience as a mom now, the first thing I would say is that sudden changes are usually not welcome. So I would not toss out all the breakfast cereal. Instead, I would remove it from its original box and put it into a large airtight plastic container. I would serve it along with more wholesome options, like scrambled eggs, boca burgers, fruit and nuts. Whole milk, yogurt. Or I would treat it like dessert, and offer it after dinner. Also, over time, I would slowly begin to add very small amounts of nutritious foods to the container. Maybe whole oats. Peanuts. Sunflower seeds. Flax seeds, raisins. Sesame seeds, almonds, dried apples. You get the idea. Real food.