How Important is Breakfast?

[Katie Meadow]

When you bake a lot of bread (not me, him) you eat a lot of toast. And when you make your own marmalade you eat a lot of toast with that. Once I get out of bed I need to eat something with carbs. I can't be bothered cooking anything. And then there's the NYT sitting on the table waiting for me. No, definitely no time to cook. I've always been made nervous by the idea of brunch. I feel like I shouldn't eat first, but I can't not have at least one piece of toast or something in order to make it through until the brunch. Also I'm not chatty at breakfast, a fact that always annoyed my mother when I went to visit.

 

Lately we've taken to eating ricotta on toast. And ever since we went south for our daughter's wedding I'm a big fan of sorghum butter on toast. Salted. Lox and bagels is always good. Sadly our favorite place to buy good bagels, good cream cheese and good lox in one place has now cut back to once a week orders only, so I'm missing that due to laziness primarily and having to think ahead days to place an order. I'm also very happy to have left over  (veg) pizza for breakfast, crisped and melted in the toaster, never cold. I don't really like eggs or any kind of meat for breakfast. Anything that looks like a face on the plate, such as two fried eggs and a bacon smile is a nightmare as far as I am concerned.

[chromedome]

31 minutes ago, Katie Meadow said:

I don't really like eggs or any kind of meat for breakfast. Anything that looks like a face on the plate, such as two fried eggs and a bacon smile is a nightmare as far as I am concerned.

 

LOL Yes, that's one distinctive you'll find if you ever travel in Canada. Here the default egg is always over-easy, and there are few places (basically just southern Ontario) where sunny-side eggs have a foothold. The comment you'll typically hear is "I don't like 'em looking back at me."

[Okanagancook]

1 hour ago, scamhi said:

I stopped eating breakfast. it is NOT important except to the folks selling breakfast foods.

I start my eating 16-18 hours after we finish dinner the previous night.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/well/eat/the-benefits-of-intermittent-fasting.html

This article is behind a paywall but I googled another similar looking article on intermittent fasting and found many of the claims made to be unsupported by human based scientific research.

Anton Article:  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13670-013-0062-5#page-1

 

[chromedome]

On 5/7/2020 at 3:02 PM, Okanagancook said:

Good luck with the first link....the sunglasses are there for a reason!!!

 

 

It is indeed a dense read, but manageable. I've gotten as far as section 1.5 after last night, and so far it's fascinating. My GF's mother has NAFLD and my daughter has some sort of esoteric, as-yet-undetermined form of insulin resistance (further testing, of course, is on hold for the duration of COVID) so it's a subject I've intended to take up seriously for a while. Also T1 diabetes runs on one side of my family, which raises the urgency level just a bit.

 

The broad strokes are easy enough to manage (healthy diet, moderate excercise) but I like knowing the details as well.

 

[Okanagancook]

Fantastic!  I love biochemistry....had many of the common pathways committed to memory back in the day of working as a clinical dietitian.  It is fascinating.  Diabetes is a scourge that is incredibly complex.  Glad you are enjoying the read.

[chromedome]

34 minutes ago, Okanagancook said:

Fantastic!  I love biochemistry....had many of the common pathways committed to memory back in the day of working as a clinical dietitian.  It is fascinating.  Diabetes is a scourge that is incredibly complex.  Glad you are enjoying the read.

I'd be lying if I said I followed every thread in the explanation, because a) I don't have the training, and b) don't need to know (I am not, and do not plan to become, an endocrinologist). As an interested lay person it's enough to follow the main thread, knowing that if I should later want to take a deeper dive on any part of the cycle, well...that too can be Googled.
 

It's more or less a job skill. On some of the sites I write for, I actually need to take this kind of information and boil it down into something anyone can grasp ("...your liver normally makes fuel for your cells from the foods you eat, but if you're fasting it has a backup plan..."). Hence my usual response when someone asks what I do for a living: "Look sh*t up on the internet and explain it to people."

My big irritation/regret right now is that I don't have the math skills to follow the statistical analysis in a lot of papers, so I have to rely on the opinion of others as to whether there's been any p-hacking. Years ago I had a friend who taught stats courses but I didn't avail myself of his skills. (sigh) I suppose there's always Khan Academy or something...

[chromedome]

Tongue-in-cheek (it is Drew Magary, after all...) but not inapposite:

https://www.sfgate.com/food/slideshow/Drew-Magary-pancake-breakfast-diet-coronavirus-202014.php

[suzilightning]

When you are in a meditation meeting at 8 am and all you can think about are ramen or corned bee f has with hash browns and eggs scrambled hard and your stomach won't stop rumbling - you make sure you have a little something before hand.