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There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

nytimes.com

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Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#111

Post by pessimizer »

collyw wrote: post #93
pessimizer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that's not what they taught us in school, which was that we were supposed to have a pile of carbs with more carbs sprinkled on top and wash it down with carb juice and milk. Bacon and eggs would kill you by clogging your heart with pan drippings.

Is there any scientific evidence that carbs are bad? It seems to be true on the internet, but I would prefer to see some proper peer reviewed studies.

Carbs aren't bad, they're just calorie-rich, hard on the pancreas and less satisfying than not-carbs, so you eat more of them.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#112

Post by jdmichal »

markbnj wrote: post #50

I'd be interested to know whether the author eats in the evening. I don't think he mentioned one way or another. I don't eat anything after a light dinner and I usually wake up very hungry. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but if someone typically sleeps 6 to 8 hours starting at, say, Midnight, and the last meal prior to retiring was at 7 PM, that is 12-13 hours without food.

I typically go from 1900-2000 (dinner) to 1200 (lunch) the next day. Everyone is different, and then there's the fact that this is daily habit training. I start getting hungry around 1100 and 1800, because ¡surprise!, I typically eat about an hour later. I have no doubt that if I started eating breakfast when I woke up, I'd probably wake up hungry also.

EDIT: I should also point out that I trained myself to fast during college. One day a week I wouldn't eat at all. Now, when I get hungry, the feeling will last for a little bit then go away.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#113

Post by will_brown »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #107
will_brown wrote: post #76

>I don’t eat breakfast...In fact, I’m rarely hungry until about lunchtime. So, other than a morning cup of coffee, I don’t eat much before noon. This is fairly amusing. First, coffee is a well known appetite suppressant. Second, unless coffee is black it is probably far from zero calories, with dairy and sugar maybe between 200-300 [empty] calories which would be in the ball park of bacon and an egg. Of course some s…

You're grossly inflating those calorie numbers. A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories. Nonfat brings it down to 80. A grande dark roast at Starbucks is 5 calories, 1 tsp of sugar is 16 calories, and 1oz of milk is 12 calories. Unless you're drinking milk and sugar with a splash of coffee, you won't get anywhere near 200-300 calories. Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest…

Honestly, I used starbucks website to get my numbers, so maybe they are grossly inflating those numbers.

>Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest drinks you'll find at Starbucks - only has 440 calories, so you'd need to really add a lot of syrups to get to >600.

Example: Iced White Chocolate Mocha = 640 calories

>A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories.

I would say the 120 is fair for an average consumer on an average day and purposes of my point. I would still say that is a substantial amount of empty calories. Its really no different than having a 12 oz coke every morning from an empty calorie point of view. Again my main point is the calories from coffee didn't even enter the authors mind when even at 120 calories the coffee could easily replaced with a nutritious breakfast of say 1 whole egg and 2-3 egg whites (~120 calories).

Edit: a Google Search of "Starbucks nutritional information" shows a menu of 51 drinks of those 40 go above 200 calories (most well exceed 300) and only 11 can't be made to order above 200.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#114

Post by curun1r »

maxerickson wrote: post #34
seanwilson wrote: post #9

It seems pretty clear our understanding of diet is still in its infancy and news sites need to stop reporting every small piece of diet evidence as advice people should follow. Journalists in general need to do a much better job of explaining how robust new evidence is. I love this website for health science news and wish there were more like it: http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx In each article they break…

I'd say it is at least a ways into adolescence. Understanding vitamins and trace minerals was a pretty big step forward.

I actually think it wasn't. It was our first foray into nutritionalism [1], which is the belief that foods can be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed and still be healthy. This has proven wrong over and over again. No matter how much we discover about what our foods contain, it's been consistent over the past 150 or so years that when we process food, it removes healthy stuff that doesn't get reintroduced when we try to add it back in.

The discovery of vitamins led to Wonder Bread, when we thought that we could make highly processed white flour healthy by adding vitamins. We now know that Wonder Bread, despite the vitamins, is one of the least healthy things you can put into your body since it basically converts directly to sugar. And that's just one example, the middle of a supermarket is replete with boxes of processed foods which claims to have added healthy stuff that have consistently made the people who consume them less healthy than the people who get their food from the produce and deli aisles, where there's no added vitamins and no such health claims.

If we've learned one immutable truth from recent health studies, it's that we're really bad at constructing foods that are healthier than what nature has already constructed. That's not to say that we shouldn't continue to try to learn about what's in the foods we eat, but that information should be used to constitute a diet of natural foods rather than foods engineered to be healthy.

Research, especially when it's reported without understanding like the media typically does, leads to fads that almost always turn out to be wrong. It's how we spent 4 decades trying to eat low fat which led to the highest obesity and diabetes rates ever. Meanwhile, those eating traditional diets based on the foods that their ancestors have eaten for generations are consistently healthier. Given that we know so much more about vitamins and minerals than they do, how is that they're so much healthier than us? If our understanding of vitamins hasn't made us healthier, is it really a big step forward?

[1] https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-foo...

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#116

Post by swozey »

stonemetal wrote: post #37
gravypod wrote: post #7

Isn't the first meal that you eat in the day your "breakfast?" Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".

No, just because breakfast is a compound word doesn't mean it must exactly match the two words it is composed of. Spearmint isn't mint leaves tied to a spear, Carhop doesn't involve jumping in any way, and understand doesn't involve standing anywhere let alone under anything.

He's completely right, the origin of "breakfast" is ending your nightly fast. It's been in use since at least the 15th century, prior to that (Old English) morgenmete was used; morning meal.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#117

Post by epimetheus »

will_brown wrote: post #109
gutnor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is fairly amusing. Or not. The effect of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is nowhere close to letting you skip a meal (that's what we are talking about when saying breakfast, not 5 corn flakes with a sip of milk). A lot of people take their tea/coffee without sugar and the calorie content of a table spoon of milk is negligible.

>The effect of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is nowhere close to letting you skip a meal I don't know what you mean by saying caffeine doesn't let someone skip a meal, no one is asking permission. Most can skip a meal with or without caffeine, but the caffeine would only help curb hunger pains in those few hours before lunch. I am not suggesting caffeine has some magical properties (though we all know it does).…

That's all milk though, and be sure you look at the unsweetened data.

A 16oz, Ice Coffee (which is what I prefer so that's what I'm posting), is a mere 5 calories[0] - drip coffee with no sweetener or splenda or some other low/no calorie sweetener would be the same.

[0] - http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/iced-coffee/iced-coffee...

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#118

Post by iopq »

curun1r wrote: post #114
maxerickson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it is at least a ways into adolescence. Understanding vitamins and trace minerals was a pretty big step forward.

I actually think it wasn't. It was our first foray into nutritionalism [1], which is the belief that foods can be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed and still be healthy. This has proven wrong over and over again. No matter how much we discover about what our foods contain, it's been consistent over the past 150 or so years that when we process food, it removes healthy stuff that doesn't get reintroduced when…

Except for people who eat Soylent, they're so far alive and healthy.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#119

Post by curun1r »

steego wrote: post #85
douche wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacon and eggs is still better than a sugar-blasted bowl of breakfast cereal, which it seems we are thankfully getting away from as the default breakfast.

The breakfast cereal industry has their own message devised by their own PR teams. I can't help but appreciate how this comment shifts the topic to a false dichotomy between the breakfast cereal industry and the breakfast meats industry.

Exactly. The best thing I ever did was take a piece of breakfast advice from an ultramarathoner's book. He advised eating salad for breakfast. It was weird, at first, but once I got used to it my energy levels for the entire day were improved. I've since begun eating my protein/fat-rich breakfast foods in the evening, before bed when the lack of carbohydrates makes it easier for me to sleep.

I'm eating the same healthy foods as before, but simply varying when I eat them and breaking free from the accepted norms of what to eat, when has had a marked effect on my energy and concentration. The usual YMMV, sample-of-one disclaimers apply, but I'd encourage people to play around with their notions of when certain foods should be consumed and see if there's a better option for you than what society suggests universally for everyone.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#120

Post by amelius »

mmastrac wrote: post #5

This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Studies that support his conclusion, while flawed, are probably right. Studies that oppose it are obviously tainted by various problems. The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'. This is honestly just a low-quality, cherry-picked opinion piece by someone who really…

> The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'.

It seems that your comment is equally handwavy :)

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