2 Potato Week 10 Eating Breakfast

Reminder: I’m not a doctor I’m just a person on a journey just like you.

I’ve been doing research on how I can change my eating style within the boundaries of my new lifestyle of being on the path to a PhD. So far, it has been rocky going. I haven’t even walked in a week again. Mainly because I’ve had to restart my experiment due to circumstances beyond my control (the roof of the greenhouse leaks and despite being told about it for over two years they are just now working on it).

I strongly believe, energy in - energy out = weight loss or gain. However, the research consistently shows that people that keep weight off eat breakfast.. my least favorite meal of the day. But.. I’m trying to switch. Currently that’s not leading to weight loss but I’m going to take it as if I’m quitting smoking and keep trying till I figure it out.

Study after study says we need to eat breakfast.

escience news
webmd
AJCN
meals matter
Science Direct
Harvard

According to AJN:

Fifty-two moderately obese adult women were stratified according to their baseline breakfast-eating habits and randomly assigned a weight- loss program. The no-breakfast group ate two meals per day and the breakfast group ate three meals per day. The energy content of the two weight-loss programs was identical. After the 12-wk treatment, baseline breakfast eaters lost 8.9 kg in the no-breakfast treatment and 6.2 kg in the breakfast treatment. Baseline breakfast skippers lost 7.7 kg in the breakfast treatment and 6.0 kg in the no-breakfast treatment. This treatment-by-strata-by-time interaction effect (P less than 0.06) suggests that those who had to make the most substantial changes in eating habits to comply with the program achieved better results. Analyses of behavioral data suggested that eating breakfast helped reduce dietary fat and minimize impulsive snacking and therefore may be an important part of a weight-reduction program.

Hmmm..that’s 25% or greater increase in weight loss by eating breakfast. There are other studies:
Journal of the American Dietetic Association

Breakfast eaters generally consumed more daily calories yet were less likely to be overweight,

Eating more and weighing less..sounds great.

Really I could go on endlessly quoting and linking studies that reinforce breakfast being so important, but this is the one that kicked me over the edge: Nature

We have previously defined some behaviors that are common to successful weight-loss maintainers in the NWCR (4) . These include: eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet; regular self-monitoring of body weight and food intake; and high levels of physical activity. We now add a fourth behavior common to these individuals—eating breakfast on a regular basis.

Truth in blending statement: I never ate breakfasts except late night at Denny’s And.. I’ve been slipping in that self-monitoring part and the physical activity part (where I am aiming at compromise with being more active NOT ‘exercising’).

It is striking not only that breakfast eating is a frequent behavior among individuals within this group, but also that such a high proportion (78%) report eating breakfast every day of the week. It is also striking that very few (less than or equal to 5%) of these successful weight-loss maintainers report never eating breakfast. Skipping breakfast seems to be far less prevalent among successful weight-loss maintainers than among the general public (9).

Less than 5 percent of those who are successful at maintaining weight loss skip breakfast… sighs.. Time for a lifestyle change, I mean..c’mon, it’s NATURE, you don’t get much more peer reviewed than that.

Of course, you need to use a trained and skeptical eye when reading reports. Even one from the American Heart Association. In April of 1998 a research article came out stating that high fat breakfasts lead to an increase in factor VIIa, a blood clotting factor, which they claim leads to a likelihood of a heart attack. They went on to say that it didn’t matter which kinds of fats you ate, factor VIIa levels would increase for hours afterwards. Their belief was that Factor VIIa becomes Thrombin which creates fibrin which causes clotting which might lead to increased heart attacks.

But then, you have to read the fine print. They tested four different fat combinations and extrapolated to ‘all fats are bad’. As those of us who have been reading along in this diary series know, all fats are NOT bad. Which aren’t bad? Omega 3s, but we’ve narrowed it down further here, to DHA and EPA. ALA, while essential, doesn’t become DHA and EPA in great enough amounts in the human body to balance all those Omega 6’s we take in. So what fats did the study test?

In the study, four different fat-rich breakfast diets, each of which contained 50 percent of calories from fat, were tested. The diets differed in fatty acid composition. One had palmitic acid (a highly saturated fat found in animals); one had stearic acid (found in beef and cocoa butter) and the other two contained different ratios of linoleic and linolenic acid (found in corn, canola and other vegetable oils).

So.. what’s fat is missing? Yes you guessed it, Omega 3’s. Linoleic acid (LA) is an unsaturated omega-6 fatty acid. y-linolenic acid is also an omega 6 fatty acid while a-linolenic acid is indeed an omega 3.. it’s the weak one ALA.. not the best ones DHA and EPA. Further, their sources of ALA are from canola and corn oils which are really high in omega 6’s and therefore BAD FOR YOU. Ratio is important and judging from their list of sources they were using high levels of Omega 6’s to a very minor level of Omega 3’s. But most importantly, it’s not DHA or EPA.

Even within the article is another clue that we should be skeptical of the study:

“It is not clear if factor VIIa is a causal risk factor for heart disease, but if it were, this would mean that individuals would be at risk for heart attack after a fat-rich meal,” he says.

So.. I’m changing my lifestyle, I’m eating breakfast and going back to recording everything I eat and weighing in daily. I’m sure this is going to cost me in my study time but what good is it to get my PhD and die three days later? I need to put more emphasis on getting healthy.

This leads me to what I’m eating in my new breakfast regimen and why I dissected the study from AHA. I’m eating jack mackerel patties.

Here’s my recipe:
1/3rd can jack mackerel mashed
1 egg
1/4 cup rolled oats
1 tablespoon mustard
1/4 tablespoon garlic
1/4 sweet onion

Cooked in an enamel pain with no added oil. I eat it with a couple pepperoncinis and a dill pickle.

Calories 342
Protein 154.1
Saturated Fat 49.3
Unsaturated Fat 70
Carbs 68.3

Add ten calories from the pepperoncinis and 10 calories from the dill pickles and that’s a hearty 362 calorie start to the day. I started at half a can of mackerel and two eggs at 500. That seemed too high so I’m tweaking it down, at least to start. The ‘Big Breakfast‘ folks think I should keep it at the first level. I’m going to run the experiment on myself and see what I think. I’ve been doing it about a week now and one thing I have found is that I’m hungrier than before. So now, I need to take more snacks to school. It’s all about balance and making things EASY. Right now, I’m in transition. So far, I’m staying stable without my daily walking. I hope once the walking gets added back in, I’ll start dropping again. I’d also like to start using steel cut oats instead of rolled oats for the added nutrition but that requires another lifestyle change that I’m not up to yet.. I’d have to put the steel cuts to soak the night before.. or maybe even cook them the night before then add them in the morning. That’s too much to ask of myself in one month. Plus, I got the COSTCO sized box of rolled oats …almost a lifetime supply!

Oh, and about eggs.. I just don’t believe that eggs are bad for you. I think it’s a case, just like eating butter in moderation, that has been confounded with bad sources of fat like crisco and corn oil. Eggs being bad for you has been disputed in a zillion studies as well. Almost all cholesterol in the human body is produced by the liver. You want links?

AJCN Again:

The serum cholesterol distribution curves of the subjects according to tertile of egg intake were almost identical, and no relationship between egg intake and coronary heart disease incidence was found. It is concluded that within the range of egg intake of this population differences in egg consumption were unrelated to blood cholesterol level or to coronary heart disease incidence.

Or PubMed:

Plasma cholesterol levels were more sensitive to dietary fat quality than to cholesterol quantity. The results demonstrate that the responses to dietary cholesterol and fat are highly individualized and that most individuals have effective feedback control mechanisms.

Meaning for most people dietary control of cholesterol, certainly within reason, doesn’t affect blood serum levels. Let me repeat, I’m not a physician. Maybe you’re one of the few it matters for. But for the vast majority of us we’ve been giving up a great source of nutrition for no real reason. It’s only an issue in people who’s feedback mechanisms are failing.
And finally these two studies show that people who eat eggs are just healthier overall than those that don’t including cholesterol levels:

People who reported eating >= 4 eggs/wk had a significantly lower mean serum cholesterol concentration than those who reported eating <= 1 egg/wk (193 mg/dL vs. 197 mg/dL, p < 0.01). More frequent egg consumption was negatively associated with serum cholesterol concentration (ß=-6.45, p < 0.01).

Conclusions: In this cross-sectional and population-based study, egg consumption made important nutritional contributions to the American diet and was not associated with high serum cholesterol concentrations.

However, data from free-living populations show that egg consumption is not associated with higher cholesterol levels. Furthermore, as a whole, the epidemiologic literature does not support the idea that egg consumption is a risk factor for coronary disease. Within the nutritional community there is a growing appreciation that health derives from an overall pattern of diet rather than from the avoidance of particular foods, and there has been a shift in the tone in recent dietary recommendations away from “avoidance” messages to ones that promote healthy eating patterns. The most recent American Heart Association guidelines no longer include a recommendation to limit egg consumption, but recommend the adoption of eating practices associated with good health. Based on the epidemiologic evidence, there is no reason to think that such a healthy eating pattern could not include eggs.

from here.

One more thing, it appears for it to be breakfast you have to eat it when you first wake up. My dietitian told me within half an hour. Online reading says 1 hour. Those weight conscious body builder sites say within 1-2 hours. But that seems to be the max. I can’t eat a cooked meal within a half hour of getting up but I am trying to get it down below an hour. In the poll below, I would prefer if you kept your definition of eating breakfast to generally eating within 2 hours of getting up. I haven’t seen any studies on the effects of eating brunch….

How is everyone else’s diet going? Are you doing better than I? Is it time to push ourselves a little more as the sun starts poking out and we’re past the blah February days? How about you? Do you eat breakfast and are you maintaining weight loss by doing so?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.