How Your Breakfast - and Insulin Blood Levels - Affects Your Day

Which of these two scenarios sounds more familiar to you?

It’s morning again. You wake up and go for breakfast choice A, maybe with a tea or coffee. At work, your mind is clear and focused. You quickly put away task after task, solve problems creatively and efficiently, and communicate your ideas with confidence. Your energy doesn't flag as you gradually work up an appetite for a good healthy lunch.

Alternatively, you wake up and choose breakfast option B. But things go very differently this time. One hour into the day and you're already dragging.

Is this the way you feel in the mornings?

You do your best to ignore the feeling and push on with your work or chores – but you realize you simply cannot continue to function without a pick-me-up and eventually reach for a snack or cup of coffee.

This gives you a much needed short-term boost which soon gives way (as you knew it would) to brain fog. You struggle to keep on top of your work, but you feel as though you're investing most of your energy just in chasing your cravings to keep from crashing.
So you count the minutes until lunch time. When it arrives, you try to make healthy choices as you know you should. However, you’re not satisfied, so you end up going back for the foods you were craving all along.

If this second scenario is all too familiar while the first seems more and more like a far-off dream, don't blame yourself.
You may simply need to change one thing to set you on the right track for productivity, one that is crucial in setting the stage for the rest of your day: your breakfast.
Overnight, your body and brain have rested and re-set themselves, while your insulin blood levels are low and steady.
The first meal of your day is like the first stone dropped into a still pool. The waves it makes are the ones with the most long-lasting effects. Your choice of breakfast will remain with you and impact the quality of your day, until you go to sleep again.

To understand these two scenarios better, let’s look at them in terms of your insulin levels.
Why insulin?
Insulin is the major hormone involved in controlling blood sugar in your body. When glucose and protein from the food you eat enter your bloodstream, insulin is released from the pancreas to make sure they can be taken up into the cells in your body that need them.
As your blood sugar returns to normal, insulin release from the pancreas tapers off. There is a lag time between these 2 events. So your insulin blood levels are still high for a while after your sugar levels have normalized.
This lag time – which is more pronounced the more sugar enters your blood and the faster it gets in – is the reason for the endless cycles of snacking and craving you can’t seem to shake off.

So, going back to the first scenario when you were focused and alert - most likely your breakfast choice led to a gentle increase in your blood sugar and steady insulin blood levels.
This usually means healthy, optimal brain activity. 
In the second scenario, your choice of breakfast causes you to experience cyclic food cravings. Your insulin levels fluctuate wildly after the initial sugar spike of your meal, followed by several more spikes with every sugary snack you take.
End result - you have trouble focusing on the task at hand, because high circulating insulin levels favor a state of “rest and digest” in your body and brain and not the driven and focused state you want to be in.

So as you can see, your blood insulin level is a key player in determining the quality of your entire day.
And since breakfast sets the stage for the day's insulin activity and the cascade that follows it, your choices at breakfast are crucial for how your day goes - for better or worse!
There is no one ideal breakfast – nor is eating breakfast at all the best choice for everyone. Like any lifestyle tweak, you will need to find a setup that matches your own very personal physiology, lifestyle, and preferences.
In other words, you need to figure out what works to help YOU to be at your best.

Editor's Note: Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day!
A nutritious, well-balanced breakfast not only sustains your energy levels better than endless cups of coffee, but it has other benefits as well:
Maintains ideal body weight - breakfast eaters are more successful at losing weight and maintaining an ideal body weight compared to those who skimp on it or skip it entirely.
Sharpens your mind - a high-fiber breakfast will help you stay more alert for the rest of the day.
Protects your heart - whole-grain cereals (rather than refined cereals) lower your risk of heart disease.
Strengthens your immune system - making the right breakfast choices can help you start the day in the best possible way, with immune-boosting vitamins and minerals.

This superb post was conceived and written by Gittit Szwarc, with a little rewriting and editing for style.

On Cholesterol, Part II - Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Cardiovascular diseases - including coronary artery disease or heart disease, heart attacks and stroke - are by far the #1 killer across the world.
Far from being limited to developed nations, up to 80% of cases occur in developing countries. In fact, a staggering 60% of the world's cardiovascular disease is estimated to occur in India alone.
Smoking, high blood pressure, and cholesterol are the usual suspects. In fact, the association between cholesterol and heart disease is firmly fixed in most people's minds.

Heart disease is known to be triggered by atherosclerosis, a hidden chronic condition that affects the walls of arteries and can be present for decades before any clinical symptoms appear.
Atherosclerosis can damage or kill heart cells and lead to sudden death by heart failure. Understanding what triggers this invisible danger and how it develops is critical step to prevent it from happening.
Interestingly, studies have shown that with the right dietary and lifestyle interventions, atherosclerosis can in fact be reversed in most people!
So - do blood cholesterol levels cause atherosclerosis and heart disease?

Let's briefly consider the human heart - a muscular, 4-chambered organ the size of a fist, weighing some 250-350 grams and located behind the breast bone. It pumps blood throughout the body by contracting rhythmically in a specific sequence - check out this cool animation of how the heart works.
Our hearts function in this complex manner 60 to 70 times every minute, roughly 36 million times every year of our lives! Now that is a true miracle, and not an insignificant one at that...
Arteries are blood vessels that carry oxygenated blood from the heart to all parts of the body. When healthy, they are strong and flexible and can easily cope with the constant changes in blood pressure that happen when your level of physical activity changes, or you change position such as getting up from being seated or lying down.
Arteries that supply the heart muscle are called coronary arteries.



Atherosclerosis is the buildup of a fatty material called plaque on the inside walls of arteries, a slow and insidious process that takes place over many years. These plaques or lesions are made up of fat, cholesterol, calcium, white blood cells, muscle cells and scar tissue.
Plaques make arteries stiffer and less elastic, which means they are more likely to get damaged with constant changes in blood pressure. The lumen - the inner space through which blood flows - becomes narrower, restricting blood and nutrient flow to tissues.
Narrower arteries also means that more blood pressure is needed to pump blood and the heart has to work harder.

If these dangerous plaques form in coronary arteries, blood flow to the heart itself is affected. The heart needs a steady supply of oxygen to work properly. When blood flow to an area of the heart decreases, that part functions less efficiently, affecting overall heart function.
Atherosclerotic plaque formation in coronary arteries is a critical first step necessary for life-threatening heart attacks to happen. 
In adults, high levels of the "bad" cholesterol known as low-density lipoprotein or LDL cholesterol, low levels of the "good" cholesterol known as high-density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol, hypertension, smoking, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and obesity are all associated with a high risk for atherosclerosis.

According to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), high levels of cholesterol are responsible for plaque formation, and by implication cause heart disease.
This view is propagated as gospel by much of the medical establishment, regulatory agencies and drug companies.

There are 2 major flaws in this argument.
FIRST - there is plenty of evidence to show that atherosclerosis is not triggered by cholesterol, although it contributes to plaque buildup.
In fact, several studies have shown that there is zero correlation between cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis! (More on this in a future post).
In other words, the popular association between heart disease and cholesterol is a mythical one. So why do the medical establishment and drug companies still propagate this imaginary association?
Good question.

Let's consider the evidence.
Dr. Dwight Lundell is a leading cardiovascular surgeon who has performed over 5,000 heart surgeries. He states bluntly, "Dropping your cholesterol levels will not lower your risk of heart disease, heart attacks, or strokes".
That's pretty straightforward, isn't it?

Dr. Michael Ozner, MD, is the author of The Great American Heart Hoax, a fascinating book about what actually works to prevent heart disease.
 
Based on his extensive personal experiences with heart disease patients, he's firmly convinced that chemical oxidation of LDL cholesterol is one of the first steps in atherosclerosis.
Oxidized LDL cholesterol is very reactive and attacks the muscle cells that make up artery walls. Over time, our body’s inflammatory response to such repeated attacks and the injury that follows triggers atherosclerotic plaque formation in arteries.
In other words, he believes there is no association between heart disease and cholesterol levels.

SECOND - heart attacks are not caused by the plaques themselves.
According to Dr. Lundell and other experts, the real culprits are clots created by our body's own protective mechanisms when unstable plaques occasionally rupture.
Over time, these clots detach and flow freely in the blood. They may move downstream into smaller blood vessels and obstruct blood flow, causing angina or heart attacks.
Angina is the pain or discomfort that occurs when not enough oxygen-rich blood is available to heart muscle. Heart attacks happen when the blood flow is completely blocked. Lack of oxygen can cause heart cells to die within 5 minutes.

The take-home message is this - blood levels of cholesterol are not the trigger for atherosclerosis, which causes angina, heart attacks and strokes.

Yet the pharmaceutical industry makes millions of dollars every year by prescribing cholesterol-lowering medications such as statins and other drugs to people in so-called "high-risk" groups. Nowadays these drugs are even being prescribed to ordinary people whose cholesterol levels are judged to be "too high". 
Since blood cholesterol levels are not the trigger for heart disease, these medications are not very effective against heart attacks and - as evidence shows - possibly even downright harmful to human health.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that high cholesterol levels are good for your heart, they aren't. But in an average human being with a physiological range of cholesterol levels, they are not the trigger for heart attacks.
The real cause, as we shall explore in another post, is something else - inflammation, which underlies many aspects of human disease including oxidation of LDL cholesterol, the first step in atherosclerosis.
And unless inflammation and its causes are specifically addressed, nothing - no medication available on the market today, or expensive invasive procedures such as angioplasty and coronary bypass surgery - will reduce your risk of a first or recurrent heart attack.