Breakfast has been described as “the most important meal of the day,” but my training and experience suggests that what is most important is not whether you eat but what you choose to eat.
One of my first dietary recommendations for weight loss — and overall better health — is to avoid carbs for breakfast. Eating carbs, even whole grains, starts you out on a blood sugar rollercoaster. Many patients who ditch the toast, bagels and pancakes for breakfast — instead eating meats, dairy products or low-carb veggies — find they have fewer food cravings throughout the rest of the day and eat less overall.
There is evidence to support this idea. In a study published in medical journal Pediatrics, Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Boston Children’s Hospital, found that breakfast and lunch choices given to obese children had a significant effect on how hungry they felt and how much they ate throughout the rest of the day.
Twelve teenage boys were tested three separate times, eating low-, moderate- and high-carb meals at breakfast and lunch. Then they were allowed to eat whatever they wanted the rest of the day. The researchers used a vegetable omelet as the low-carb meal, steel-cut oatmeal sweetened with fruit sugar as the moderate-carb meal and instant oatmeal sweetened with glucose as the high-carb choice. (Instant oatmeal is not necessarily higher in carbs, but it does raise your blood sugar faster because it is more processed. They also added more sugar than the other oatmeal.) All meals were designed to have the same amount of calories.
They also had the children rate their hunger every hour. Not surprisingly, the highest hunger rankings happened a few hours after eating a high-carb breakfast. As a result, the children ate more — far more, as it turns out — after a carb-dense breakfast and lunch. Starting the day with sweetened oatmeal led these children to eat a whopping 81 percent more calories than when they ate an omelet. Even the less processed oatmeal had an effect compared to the instant; the children ate 53 percent fewer calories after less processed steel-cut oatmeal than after the instant oatmeal.
The researchers also monitored their blood sugar. An hour after eating, the childrens’ blood sugar was twice as high after eating the high-carb meal than after eating the protein-based meal. They also noticed that blood sugar dropped to below normal four to five hours after the high-carb meal — that did not happen with the other meals. Low blood sugar is associated with hunger, even cravings. What food will raise it back the fastest? Sweets and other carb-based foods, of course.
It was not a coincidence that the researchers chose to study children who already were overweight. Some of us are more sensitive to the blood sugar rollercoaster than others. I’m sure this is true of children, also. But children are fed so many processed and refined carbs — carbs in general. Even someone resistant to the cravings will develop them after years of this diet. More and more nutritionists feel our high-carb diet — especially for breakfast — is the primary cause of the huge surges in diabetes and obesity in our young.
Perhaps the bacon and eggs we used to eat for breakfast were not the health threat we have been told after all.
Dr. Michael Noonan practices chiropractic, chiropractic acupuncture and other wellness therapies in Old Town. He can be reached at noonanchiropractic@gmail.com.