Eating Breakfast Might Have Beneficial Effects
Is your breakfast worse than no breakfast?
I came across a study that I can say without a doubt is amateurish
and useless. Here’s what the researchers concluded:
“Eating breakfast might have beneficial effects on appetite, insulin
resistance and energy metabolism [sugar abnormality] rates
were 35 percent to 50 percent lower among
people who ate breakfast every day compared to those who
frequently skipped it.”
Come again? Talking about breakfast, without identifying what
they mean by breakfast, is about as sensible as talking about love
or religion or sex without some qualification.
A nutritious breakfast IS good – but the breakfast chosen by most
Americans is worse than no breakfast at all. The big food
companies have convinced most people that food barely adequate
for barn animals and lots of sugar and starch are the way to start
your day. And the junk medicine study mentioned above
perpetuates the food industry’s propaganda by saying that “people
who ate whole-grain cereal each day had a 15 percent lower risk of
insulin resistance syndrome.”
If you start your day the Kellogg way, you’ll get what you deserve
- obesity and diabetes. Cereal, muffins, and other standard
breakfast offerings contain massive amounts of sugar – or pure
carbohydrates that your body converts to sugar. Bombarding your
system with these foods every morning will make your pancreas
work overtime to produce insulin – and wearing out your pancreas
will lead to diabetes.
Calling it “insulin-resistant diabetes” or “adult onset diabetes” or
“insulin resistance syndrome” distracts us from the simple truth:
that the most common addiction in the
world – and far more harmful than cocaine or heroin – is SUGAR
ADDICTION. In the good old days prior to WW II, diabetes was
called exactly what it was: “sugar diabetes.”
What you eat for breakfast shouldn’t be any different than what
you eat for the rest of the day. A high animal fat breakfast gets you
off to a stable start, free of violent fluctuations in blood sugar. So
(1) Eat eggs, which can be prepared in a hundred different
ways from raw, to poached, to juevos rancheros.
<BR>(2) Pork (especially bacon), medium rare beef, and poached
fish are all excellent sources of fat and protein that
will keep you satisfied much longer than a donut.
<BR>(3) Dairy products (including cheese) are good too – just
make sure they’re all unhomogenized.
<BR>(4) If you need something sweet to go along with your protein-
packed breakfast, have a piece of fresh whole fruit – not
juice or canned fruit.
<BR>(5) Wash it all down with a cup of black coffee and you’ll be
set to face the day.
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The power of pessimism
Everyone has heard of the placebo effect. Simply put, it happens
when you feel better after undergoing some sort of treatment just
because you believe that treatment is helping
you. But you probably haven’t heard of the nocebo effect or, if you
like, the “negative placebo effect.” This is, essentially, the opposite
of the placebo effect, meaning that
if you think strongly enough that a treatment will not work, and
then it won’t. (I’ve come up with my own version of the negative
placebo effect, which I’ve named the Douglass
Effect. It goes something like this: “This medicine makes me feel
terrible, so it must be working – that must mean I am actually
feeling better.” It’s also a good IQ test.)
But, I digress.
Back to the nocebo effect: Harvard doctor Herbert Benson says
three things drive both the placebo and nocebo effects: beliefs and
expectations of patients, their healthcare
providers’ beliefs and expectations, and the interaction between the
two. The U.S. Office of Alternative & Complementary Medicine
(OACM) published a paper on this. I’m still looking for it.
These effects are real but they don’t last. The laboratory and other
concrete measurements, such as blood pressure and X-rays, will
eventually rule the day and bring in a verdict.
Always starting my day off the right way,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
