LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

fiber

The Diabetic Breakfast; Why You Should Avoid Oatmeal

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breakfast options for diabetes
mariiya / Dollar Photo Club

This is not the first time I’ve debunked the idea that oatmeal and Cheerios are good breakfast options, despite the frequent recommendation.

Breakfast is, without a doubt, one of the most important health decisions you’ll make in a given day.  And that decision starts with actually having breakfast.  The decision to skip breakfast is one of the most common problems I find in patients.  Sometimes patients say they just aren’t hungry, don’t have time or are nauseous when they first wake up.

If you’re not hungry first thing in the morning, all it takes is a little amount of fuel to begin your day properly.  A handful of raw almonds or a tablespoon of real peanut butter can be enough to jump start your system.  Here’s the deal:  Your brain needs fuel in the morning whether you feed it or not.  If you choose to skip breakfast, your body will break down precious muscle to fuel your brain.

If you’re looking for the “less muscle, more fat” look, then by all means continue to skip breakfast.  If, however, this isn’t the look you are deliberately going for, then breakfast has to be on the menu, hungry or not.  Eventually, your body will get used to getting fed early and will let you know it’s ready for fuel from outside the body by stimulating hunger.

The time excuse is not a good one, either.  I’ve had patients use the time excuse but will run through the drive-thru of McDonalds to buy an Egg McMuffin, which arguably takes time as well.  Compare that to warming up an Amy’s breakfast burrito for 1 and a half minutes in the microwave (with the added bonus of being less expensive).  The same goes for the aforementioned handful of almonds or bit of real peanut butter.

As for the nausea, this boils back down to your body looking inside for fuel.  The sympathetic / adrenal pathway gets activated and this shuts down digestion, potentially leaving you feeling nauseous.  Again, within a short period of time your body will adapt to being fed and you’ll find yourself being hungry instead of nauseous at breakfast time.

Which brings us back to the all-important “what” for breakfast.  This has remained an avenue of very poor recommendations for a long time now.  Yogurt, with very few exceptions, is not a good option.  If you’re going to do yogurt, make sure you’re doing plain Greek yogurt with a higher protein content and lower calories (you’ll have to read the labels and compare…consider brands like Fage that can be found at Costco) only with a serving of fresh or frozen fruit added in.

Oatmeal, again with a few exceptions, is not a good option.  Certainly the instant Quaker-type oatmeals are absolutely off the list.  I’m usually ok with the steel cut, slow cooked oatmeal with some high quality protein source mixed in (real peanut butter, nuts, granola).  But the vast majority of the oatmeal that people seem to choose for breakfast doesn’t cut it.

In general, the anti-diabetic breakfast (which we should all be eating) should be protein-based or very high fiber (8 grams or more).  Good recommendations include:

  • Eggs, either scrambled in olive oil or hard-boiled
  • High fiber, unprocessed breakfast cereal in something other than cow’s milk (Nature’s Path, Cascadian Farms, etc…)
  • Real peanut or other nut butter (no added oils) in celery or on true whole-grain bread
  • Granola (just be careful of the calories!)
  • Steel cut, slow-cooked oatmeal with a high quality protein mixed in
  • Juicing (the blending type with the pulp included) so long as you add in some type of high quality protein like powered peanut butter, high quality whey or pea protein or high protein Greek yogurt.

Just how important are these breakfast decisions for fighting off or controlling diabetes?  This particular study gives us some insight.  In it, researchers looked at the effect of glycemic index (a score for how fast sugar shows up in the bloodstream after eating a meal, the lower the better) of 4 different meals on certain markers of diabetes in a small group of Type 2 diabetics.  Here’s what they found:

  • There was more glucose in the bloodstream in the high glycemic index diet with low fiber.
  • The amount of insulin after patients consumed the high glycemic index, low fiber diet was 13% higher than the low glycemic index, high fiber diet.
  • When consuming a low glycemic diet, the diet with high fiber led to 12% lower insulin levels after a meal.
  • Ghrelin (a hormone that helps increase hunger) dropped ONLY after the low glycemic index diets (both with high and low fiber).

Overall, it is very clear that your breakfast choices will have a clear effect on how well your body does or does NOT respond after the meal.  Choosing the options listed above will lead to a much stronger anti-diabetic effect and protect every other aspect of your health.

And you’ll notice that Cheerios, the go-to breakfast to lower your cholesterol (which is probably because you’re prediabetic…), in no way, shape or form fits these recommendations.  And you will also notice that fruit, by itself, is NOT on the list.  Nor is orange juice (all calories, little value).  These items have way too much carb content without the needed protein or fiber to balance it out.

 

Fiber to Prevent Heart Disease: 5 Facts to Know NOW

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While everyone is aware that fiber is good for us, I think few actually understand just how powerful it can be.  Fewer still understand the types of fiber and actively plan fiber intake as part of our diets.

First, a primer on fiber.

In general, there are two types.  Insoluble fiber is the “roughage” that your mom told you to eat more of.  This is the stuff that does not get digested at all, but makes it intact into the sewage system.  It can act as a sponge for toxins in the gut as well as keeping “things” moving along.  Whole grains and vegetables are great sources.

Soluble fiber, which our digestive system cannot break down, does get further broken down by the bacteria in our gut, leading to compounds known as short chain fatty acids, the most important of which is butyrate.  Butyrate is a tonic for the cells of the intestinal tract, leaving them healthier and lowering the risk of cancer and autoimmune conditions of the gut like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.  The short chain fatty acids also play a role in balancing our blood sugar and hunger hours and hours after our food is ingested.  Good sources include beans, whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts.

When looking to increase the fiber in your diet, do not be fooled by tricky confectionary companies that cheat by adding things like bran fiber into the cereal box to artificially up the fiber content.  Much like everything else in the food we eat, it is likely the combination of the fiber and other countless nutrients in the foods we eat that have the best benefits.  Cheat by throwing in just the fiber and the benefits are not likely to be as great.  That’s why it’s best to avoid foods by the major confectionary companies with household names you grew up with and eat foods naturally high in fiber.

Now, back to this particular study.  In it, researchers followed 11,113 subjects, from 20 to 79 years of age for 5 years as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to look at the relationship between heart disease risk, inflammation (as measured by C-reactive protein, or CRP) and fiber intake.  Here’s what they found:

  1. Those young adults with a higher dietary fiber intake had a 271% greater chance of being classified as having a low risk of heart disease.
  2. In middle aged adults, the chance of having a low risk was 213%.
  3. When looking at those young adults who had an intermediate lifetime risk, those with higher fiber intake had a 198% greater chance.
  4. In middle aged adults, those who had a higher fiber intake had a 265% greater chance of having an intermediate risk.
  5. In general, the high the fiber, the lower the C-reactive protein levels.

To put it a little plainer, in all adults, those with the highest intake of fiber were much more likely to live their lives at a low risk of heart disease.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, those with less fiber intake were more likely to live a life at a high risk of heart disease.  This protection may have come from an overall lower level of inflammation, a major player in heart disease.

For a disease that remains a number one killer in modernized countries, the evidence remains that heart disease is almost entirely lifestyle driven.  With this in mind…

How much fiber did YOU have today?

 

Fiber Is Beneficial in the Treatment of Childhood Constipation – (03-01-04)

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Fiber (Glucomannan) Is Beneficial in the Treatment of Childhood Constipation

First, let me state that the idea that fiber can help with constipation could probably been affirmed by talking to anyone on the street. With that being said, what does concern me is the high incidence of constipation that we see in our young kids.

I don’t know of any studies that give an exact incidence, but I do know that I have many patients that ask me for help with their children’s constipation. There is something, or some combination of things, that we’re doing to our kids that is setting up this scenario. I would suggest vaccinations, poor dietary habits and heavy antibiotic use are significant contributors.

Pediatrics — Abstracts: Loening-Baucke et al. 113 (3): e259 –

Read entire article here

 

USE RYE BREAD WITH LOW GLYCEMIC INDEX – (11-13-03)

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Structural differences between rye and wheat breads but not total fiber content may explain the lower postprandial insulin response to rye bread

I know most of my patients understand the basics of what refined carbs are (primarily because I talk incessantly about nutrition until my patients all pass out…) but sometimes the specifics are difficult to grasp. Here we see that rye bread (that would NOT include those brands with enriched wheat flour in the ingredient label) has a relatively low glycemic index–a good thing.

AJCN — Abstracts: Juntunen et al. 78 (5): 957.

Read entire article here

NUTS FORM A PART OF HEALTHY LIFESTYLE HIGH IN FATS AND FIBERS – (09-01-03)

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Nut consumption and body weight

Nuts have gotten a bad rap when it comes to health, despite the fact that numerous clinical studies on several types of nuts have shown beneficial effects on blood lipids. Since that are high in fat, most people refer to nuts as “fattening.” The two are not necessarily related, as we see in this study. Nuts (in moderation, of course) are a part of a healthy lifestyle, high in monounsaturated fats, fiber and tocotrienols.

AJCN — Abstracts: Sabaté 78 (3): 647S

Read entire article here

DIABETES, OBESITY, FIBER, ANTIBIOTICS…BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER IN 3 STEPS

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In all my years of reading, there have only been a few articles that were truly pivotal.  When I first flagged this article I thought it was neat.  But the more I thought about it, the more this article resonated with some of the most important chronic diseases of our time.

To understand this article better, I need to give a little background on some very important aspect of our physiology.

Read the rest of the article

COMBINE THESE TWO THINGS TO AVOID OBESITY

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Nothing in the human body acts within a vacuum.  Seemingly everything interacts with everything else.  This can make isolated experiments looking at single interventions difficult to extrapolate to overall health.  Obesity is no different.

There has been growing research on the relationship between the bacteria in our gut and obesity.  This may mean that heavy use of antibiotics, especially in our children, may be a strong contributor to the growing obesity epidemic.

But this article adds another piece to this puzzle.  Soluble fiber cannot be digested by our gut, but it can be digested by the presence of healthy bacteria into short chain fatty acids.  In this study, researchers looked at the effect of propionic acid (one of these short chain fatty acids) on inflammation within adipocytes (fat cells).

They found that adipocytes, when exposed to propionic acid, lowered the production of several pro-inflammatory molecules such as TNF-alpha.  This is a very good thing, considering that the inflammation produced by adipose tissues in obese patients begins to wreak havoc on risk for diabetes, further obesity, cancer and osteoporosis.

The bottom line is that the use of probiotics in anyone (but especially our kids!) needs to be coupled with a diet high in soluble fiber.

Read more…

WHY NOT ALL FIBER IS CREATED THE SAME

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As devastating as it is for human health, few I have come across truly understand the difference between a whole grain or refined carbohydrate.  The typical answer include white sugars and flours.  The real answer is far more expansive. 

The whole grain contains the germ (the bulk of the protective nutrients), endosperm (the calories) and the bran (the fiber).  To extend shelf life and increase palatability to the oblivious American public, the germ and bran is lopped off and we’re left with the endosperm–the calories minus some 90% of the phytonutrients that where present in the whole grain.  The result is a devastating calorie rich/phytonutrient poor staple consumed by the vast majority of Americans.  So “enriched wheat flour,” “sugar” and “high fructose corn syrup” all fall into this category.

 In comes the fiber story.  There is no doubt that fiber, both soluble (able to be digested by the bacteria in our guts to beneficial compounds) and insoluble (“roughage”-not digestible at all) are good for our gut.  This study just expands on this, finding that fiber’s benefits extend to lowering pretty much every other cause of death.

But do not fall into the opposite end of the processed grains spectrum.  Many products like fiber supplements and many of the big name breakfast cereals (Quaker, Post, Kellogg’s, etc…) contain only the bran.  This leaves out the heavy phytonutrient content of the germ that is also devoid in the refined carbs like enriched wheat flour.

I have no doubt that the benefits of whole grains and dietary fiber are derived not merely from the fiber content, but rather the entire blend of the grain, nut, fruit, vegetable or bean.  Remember this next time you read an ingredient label.  “Fiber” does NOT appear on the ingredient label of a whole grain.

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/171/12/1061