Breakfast?

Questioning “The most important meal of the day”

Claire - Sunday, March 24, 2013

This one is quite science heavy, but it will be part of our up coming Leptin For Laymen video series and will be simplified in that. So don't get too concerned if this seems a little complicated.

Last weekend I took part in an amazing obstacle race called Kokoda Grunt and in the true spirit of the Kokoda Challenge foundation they made it really tough. It was 13km long with over 850m of elevation, which is the equivalent of climbing 286 flights of stairs. Plus lots of walls, monkey bars, mud crawls and various other obstacles. In the above 30C temperatures, it took us about 4 hours to get our whole team through. So, what did I have for breakfast pre-race to get through such a full on event?

 2L water

 1L coconut water

 1 coffee with butter, coconut oil and a dash of double cream

You might ask, where is the actual food? Where are the carbohydrates? Now there is much more to the story than the little bit I am going to share with you today, but hopefully it will get you asking a few questions about the modern wisdom of labeling breakfast as the most important meal of the day.

Let’s start with a quote out of "Good Health in the 21st Century" by Dr Carole Hungerford, which incidentally is a highly informative read. If you don't own a copy, seriously think about it next time you are book shopping.

"The biochemistry of breakfast

Insulin resistance is the end result of continuously high levels of circulating insulin. In the West, we rarely fast. Breakfast is meant to be the breaking of a fast. During that fast, our insulin levels should have fallen, stayed low until all the food is absorbed from the stomach, has entered and left the circulation, and has been distributed to the cells of the liver, fat and muscles. During this time, the cells of those organs have minimal exposure to insulin and thus maintain insulin sensitivity.

Suppose two individuals eat the same high-calorie diet. One is a grazer and spreads the meal across the waking hours of the day; the other eats in two sittings, with a long gap between the last meal of the day and the first meal of the following day. The first individual develops insulin resistance and a fatty liver, but the second stands a good chance of avoiding these complications. Why?

Throughout human evolution, hormonal influences developed to tie in with various circadian and diurnal cycles. Hormonal patterns and the impact of various activities can now be studied by laboratory measurement. One of the hormones of interest is DHEA or dehydroepiandrosterone.

DHEA is made of cholesterol, and it is a precursor to all the eostrogens and testosterones we produce. Taken as a medication, it is a banned drug for Olympic athletes because it increases their performance and is deemed to give them an unfair advantage. It is also known as a longevity hormone. Pathological states aside, DHEA levels are an indicator of the health of the individual. According to Ray Kearny, an immunologist from the University of Sydney (and a member of the delayed-breakfast brigade), contracting our eating hours by having a late start to the day improves DHEA output and appears to reduce cancer risk.

We produce DHEA in opposition to growth hormone and the glucocorticoids. High levels are reached in the early hours of the morning, as these other hormone levels fall. The rise in DHEA production is stimulated by bright sunlight, so it makes sense to be out of doors then. With our first meal, further glucocorticosteroids are produced and the DHEA surge is suppressed. The longer breakfast is delayed, the longer the DHEA peak lasts and the greater the overall output.

Early morning urine has a high concentration of DHEA. It is probably for this reason that some monks drink a glass of their own urine first thing in the morning. (Should we suggest this to the Olympians?)

The health benefits of the overnight fast include both the restoration of insulin sensitivity and the optimisation of DHEA production. Less quirky than consuming odd drinks and easier than undergoing long fasts is simply delaying breakfast until hunger asserts itself. Take a morning jog to complete the picture.

Further support for 'no breakfast' came from a report in The Lancet that normal children were unaffected or performed better without breakfast.

This all happened as a matter of course for our primitive ancestors. They ate at dusk, and finishing the meal around the campfire. Without artificial lighting they were finished with food relatively early in the evening. Although they arose with the sun, there is good reason to believe that some time elapsed before they ate. Stored food would be eaten by small animals, or would attract large animals to which humans were also prey. Almost all food was fresh (with all the attendant health benefits), whole and acquired through work. They had to find, even hunt, kill and cook breakfast before they could eat. Maybe they snacked on a few nuts and berries as they went. You worked first you ate second. You burnt energy, and then you replaced it. We do the reverse. We eat first, pre-emptively refueling in case our supplies run low. The price is called metabolic syndrome.

So in short, we really aren't giving our body enough "down-time" from insulin or enough time with peak DHEA. DHEA, as mentioned above, is the building block for all our sex hormones thus playing a huge role in fertility, but it is much more than that. DHEA helps keep our cells "young", it plays a part in cognition, muscle strength, your immune system, sex drive, cardiovascular health … the list goes on."

The commonly accepted theory behind the hearty breakfast is it sets you up with your energy needs for the day (which begs the question, ‘what was the purpose of last night’s meal, then?’) and stops your body going into "starvation mode". This is where the body supposedly begins to consume its own protein (muscle tissue) to fuel itself and slows down metabolic rate to conserve energy.

A study by Stote et al. titled A controlled trial of reduced meal frequency without caloric restriction in healthy, normal weight, middle-aged males had a control group eating the same caloric amount in three spaced-out meals in a day and compared these subjects to a group eating the same number of calories in only one meal. Neither group participated in any exercise over the 8-week trial. The one meal a day group lost body fat, gained lean muscle and lowered their cortisol levels.

Consuming just one meal a day is arguably a little excessive in terms of fasting, but it is interesting to note how the body changes simply by giving the body insulin some down time.

So, why not skip dinner if you are going to skip a meal? Why would you choose to go to bed with food in your stomach instead of waiting until morning?

First off is the fact that DHEA is stimulated by sunlight. Your body needs those 8-10 hours of darkness to move through the digestion and insulin phase to then start producing DHEA as the sun begins to come up. At this point, there is a spike in cortisol, this is the time most people eat their breakfast as they often feel "ravenous", but interestingly enough that passes quite quickly, especially if you move out into the sun at this time: A morning walk, perhaps. This spike is nothing unnatural. It is like nature’s alarm clock saying, “Hey! Get up, because you need to think about finding and preparing some food.” Your body expects it will be a few hours before you will have food in front of you.

There is another set of hormones at play here. One of the hormones that controls appetite is called leptin. It helps maintain the feeling of satiation after eating. Leptin levels are markedly increased when the body is exposed to both insulin and melatonin. Melatonin is one of the hormones involved in sleep. When the body has a normal sensitivity to leptin, adults tend to sleep through the night without waking up hungry. These higher levels of leptin last until about 15 hours after your last meal.

Something Found

Something Found

Claire Aslangul - Monday, March 11, 2013

These nondescript pebbles are in fact raw sapphires. I have had them for probably 5 years, but had them stashed away. Left forgotten in a cupboard until they fell on my head other day. They have quite a story behind them that I would love to share with you.

Once we were out camping in a National Park, it was a quiet time of year and we shared the campsite with only 3 other groups and a single man who was sleeping in the back of his ute. As you do when you have young kids, we wandered around, looking at the river, following goannas and greeting everyone else that was there. My youngest was about 5 at the time and in true kid fashion she called out to the guy sitting in the tray of his ute "Gee, you must really like beer".

I cringed, but he giggled then looked at the empty cans around him, shrugged and replied, "I guess". I shuffled the kids a long a bit, feeling embarrassed and not sure that I wanted to engage in a conversation with this man. He gave us a hearty "Bye" as we wandered away.

A little later that evening, we had our campfire going and we sat a rounding talking and playing backgammon when Mr I-am-a-fan-of-beer came over to us. The VB in his hand had been replaced by a large jar. He sat himself next to our fire and started to talk.

"I wanted to give you something. I met a girl 10 years ago and we had a dream. We would travel around in my ute, camp out and just fossick for gemstones. When we had enough, we would settle down, cut and polish them and make jewellery to sell. "We did well, we found plenty of sapphires and spent most nights under the stars together talking and sharing our common dream for the future. It was basic, but it was good."

We all must have looked like guppies with our mouths open, without so much as a "Hello" this man just started telling us his life story. But as he went on, our jaws shut and our hearts burst.

"She died of cancer last month, she just got sick so quickly and then she was gone from my life. We never got to the next part of our journey, we have never polished a single stone. In the last few days I cried so hard, knowing we would not get the chance to do it together. She just held me. When I had finished she said to me, 'We found our treasure, after all this time it was not what was hidden in the ground. It was not the jewels we would create out of what we have. All along our treasure was there, it was our nights under the stars, sharing our dreams with each other and the desert around us, it was the joy of working and seeking together.'

"I refused to really hear what she said, so tied to my grief I couldn't believe that she accepted letting go of our planned future. I don't know when it hit me that she was right. We found something so incredibly valuable in those years together and it had nothing to do with what we uncovered from the earth. "I know her, and she would want what we found to be shared. But all I want is for someone to look at these stones and remember the story behind them."

He then pulled out his jar and poured a few into each of our hands. The physical part of a treasure found.

The Symptom Lie

The Symptom Lie

Claire - Wednesday, January 30, 2013

One of the ways we measure health is to assess physical symptoms. Things like fevers, vomiting, diarrhoea, coughs and runny noses are all associated with sickness, but is that really the best way to determine how healthy we are?

Is there a time when we can have no symptoms, but be very unhealthy?

A study from Duke University Medical Centre in 2009 ascertained that between 40-60 % of all heart attacks are completely "silent" meaning there is no pain or any other symptom until the person collapses.

Another example would be cancer, it is rarely the case that cancer is picked up early because of symptoms. The onset of symptoms for cancer often don't begin for weeks, months even years since the first abnormal cell was produced.

Both heart disease and cancer are our biggest killers in the developed world, yet both can have little or no noticeable symptoms.

On the flip side:

Can you have loads of symptoms, but actually be really healthy?

Imaging you come home from work late one evening, it has been a long day with no breaks and you are ravenously hungry. In the fridge is some leftover tuna mornay from a few nights ago. You give it a quick zap in the microwave so it is no longer fridge temperature, but you are too hungry to wait for it to heat up much more than that. Along with the tuna, pasta and white sauce you inadvertently consume a couple of billion pathogenic bacteria.

An hour later your stomach starts to rumble, another 30 mins after that you are having a close encounter of the porcelain kind. You start to sweat and eventually you aren't sure which end you should point at the toilet.

Your symptoms list is growing; nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, headache...

But this is a healthy response, your body is working desperately hard to rid itself of that which could kill you if it became septicaemia or was able to attack organs such as your liver. Anyway it can, your body will flush out the pathogen and create a hostile environment for it to multiple (fever). Without these responses, you would be facing a dire health crisis that could quite easily end in death.

So if we are not measuring health by symptoms, how can we ascertain how healthy we are?

The main way to gauge health is to look at all the ways you cope with daily life:

Do you sleep well?

Do you wake up energised and happy?

Do you find you have plenty of energy to achieve all you want in your day?

Do you rarely get sick and if you do, do you bounce back to full health in a day or so?

Do you have a good relationship with food? (No cravings etc.)

Does your body feel good? (No chronic pain)

Do you recover easily from exercise?

Are you able to cope and recover from things that are emotionally challenging?

Do you have good posture?

These are all really good indicators of great health and answering yes to these questions is much more helpful than trying to gauge your health from a lack of obvious symptoms.

The Healing Power of Love

The Healing Power of Love

Claire Aslangul - Thursday, January 10, 2013

Love, the subject of countless songs, books and movies. A feeling that attracts us and moves us more than any other emotion. One of the reasons we are so strongly drawn to stories of love, be they romantic, familial or even bromantic, is that our bodies have an innate attraction to that which is healthy for us.

Love: The power to heal

Love is the product of a chemical cocktail of amazing hormones, one of which is oxytocin. Oxytocin has a number of roles in the body and in our brains creates the feelings of love, bonding, trust, empathy and altruism. The beautiful thing about it is it also acts as an antioxidant, preventing repairing free radical damage to our neurones.

Love is a gift to the giver as much as the receiver.