What's for breakfast?
I most easily help my patients with making healthier choices for lunch and dinner. At least with lunch and dinner, vegetables are considered universally acceptable, and there are many more entrée-type possibilities from which we can construct a varied and healthful diet.
But breakfast is hugely important, being the meal that stays with you for more of your waking hours than your other meals, and the one to break the longest fast (hence the name) in the 24-hour day. A folk expression is that "breakfast is like gold, lunch is like silver, and dinner is like lead." Another is: "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper." With each successive meal of the day, especially if breakfast is light and dinner heaviest, there is more and more food matter accumulating in our guts, which will not have the best digestion, partly because of the less than optimal horizontal position at night, and it can disturb our sleep.
Unfortunately, breakfast does not have as many appetizing options for people who want really healthy choices. So as these fewer options for breakfast have slowly accumulated and come into my own kitchen over the years, I want to share them with my patients and with you.
Smoothies are fast, and this makes them hugely helpful on a weekday morning. Your basic equipment is a blender. And with the ingredients lined up, your smoothie is ready in just a minute.
Start with a liquid. What nutritious value does this have? Not a whole lot. It's just to keep your blender running smoothly.
If milk is not a problem for your digestion then I must express to you my enthusiasm for raw dairy. In fact, even if dairy is a problem, perhaps especially if it's a problem, raw diary has been surprisingly tolerable for many who seem to have a dairy allergy. The problem with pasteurized diary comes from the "flash pasteurization" or "ultra-pasteurized." These processes heat the milk to a very high heat very briefly. This intense heat creates a distorted molecule, which is antigenic for many people, meaning they easily create antibodies to it.
To find raw diary near you, try Real Milk or Organic Pastures.
Now if dairy is still not your cup of tea, there are other "milks" available in health food stores. Almond milk seems to be available unsweetened. Rice milk is available with rice sweeteners, which seem to have some effect raising blood glucose. Soymilk is also available, but not optimal for reasons discussed below.
Build a nutritious smoothie with a protein
You should definitely have a protein because proteins stay with you longer than the carbohydrates that make up the rest of the smoothie. Because it is easy and a common mistake to skimp on breakfast and then eat too much later in the day, take care to build a robust smoothie.
The protein powders out on the market are sweetened with all manner of things. Unsweetened does not seem to be an option, from what I have seen. Try to only use those sweetened with stevia, because stevia has still tested well with regard to health and has zero glycemic index. Whole Foods sells the Jay Robb brand, which is stevia-sweetened. There may be other stevia-sweetened protein powders out there. Sugar, fructose and corn syrup create enormous health problems, so you will want to stay away from those. The newer synthetic sweeteners, such as Sucralose and Splenda are even worse, basically neurotoxins, and should be avoided like the plague. My book Choose Your Foods Like Your Life Depends On Them has just come out and discusses problems with sugar and the artificial sweeteners and how to avoid these traps and still have satisfying food.
The protein powders generally include whey protein, soy protein and rice protein.
Soy protein is perhaps the easiest to find and most common of the protein powders. But I don't recommend this to my patients because of the problems that soy creates in the body. Soy is high in phytates, which makes it very popular in agriculture. The phytates efficiently grab minerals even from poor soils, and this makes it easy to grow anywhere, including soils that have been depleted by over farming. The problem is that once those same phytates enter the body, they grab our minerals: zinc, magnesium, selenium and so forth, which we need for healthy functioning. As a result, soy is hard on especially the thyroid gland and brain, which are very mineral dependent. Fermented soy, such as miso or soy sauce is not as bad as unfermented soy, such as tofu and the soy isolates in soy protein powder. This article on Dr. Mercola's website discusses health problems with soy.
Rice protein is another option, especially for those who don't digest dairy well.
Next add some flavonoid antioxidants. These can be best obtained from especially dark fruits such as berries. We are now coming into about the best time of year for berries. Here in the Southwest, blackberries are ripening, and throughout the next month or two strawberries, blueberries and raspberries will all come along, followed by cherries. All of these are excellent antioxidants fruits, some of the best nourishment available. It may even be worth your while to find and purchase a cherry pitter. Pitted cherries without sweeteners are often available frozen in regular supermarkets.
Frozen berries are in fact a great addition to smoothies. The freezing helps break down plant cell walls, which makes more of the flavonoids available to you.
Probiotics work well in smoothies. It is a good idea to keep a regular supply of probiotics coming into your gut, because of the omnipresence of pathogenic microbes, such as E. coli and Candida species.
Other breakfast items
Apple slices with nut butter
Here is a vegan breakfast that is fast and has a protein, along with a fresh fruit. Thus, it should be okay for everyone. For those who have nut allergies, sunflower seed butter is sometimes available in health food stores. At any rate, just slice the apples and spread with nut butter.
Mochi
Another health food store item, made from rice. After much experimentation, I like to ignore what's on the package and cook it this way. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Cut the dense mochi square into about 16 or so one-inch squares. Lightly, very lightly, coat a pizza pan or cookie sheet or lasagna pan with a little coconut oil. Then bake for about 10 to11 minutes. The oil will smoke if you use too much. On the other hand, you will be washing the lasagna pan all day if you use too little coconut oil. Your mochi has baked nicely when it has puffed up to a small muffin, and is golden brown on top. Eat with butter, nut butter or my preserves recipe below.
My easy 45-minute homemade preserves
So you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I have made you feel too guilty to eat the sugary jellies and preserves that you find in the stores. I was so frustrated some years back that even the health food stores only carry preserves sweetened with sugar, corn syrup or grape juice, all of which spike your blood sugar and your insulin, that I started to make my own.
I expect that you will find that the following preserves are plenty sweet with just the fruit.
Take 3 pounds of any kind of berries or pitted cherries. You could use peaches, but there is a texture problem, and the result is very watery, but they do taste good anyway.
Place the fruit in a large cooking pot. Peel and dice three sour green unripe apples. Or use Granny Smith apples. Put these in the same pot. Now simmer for about 45 minutes. At the end of that time, use a potato masher to mash it well. Stir in a teaspoon of pectin powder if available to thicken it up. If you can't find pectin powder at your supermarket bakery section, then you will have more liquidy preserves, but still quite good.
Eggs with vegetables
On the weekends we generally have more time to prepare breakfast. And if you save your eggs for the weekend, you really do not need to worry about the extra cholesterol they are giving you. Please see my article in the December newsletter for a discussion of blood cholesterol and when and if you should worry about it.
Here are my Italian-style eggs. Keep rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil and parsley growing in your backyard or in pots on a balcony. Take any combination of those you like, and chop a tablespoonful finely. Sauté for a moment in generous olive oil. If you are feeling daring, grate in a clove of garlic. Chop a Roma tomato or two along with a small zucchini and sauté lightly. Beat eggs in a bowl and pour over the top. Add parmesan cheese liberally. These are some yummy eggs, I must say.
Here is another egg recipe. Beat the eggs in a bowl. Lightly oil a frying pan with coconut oil or olive oil. Sauté fresh rinsed spinach lightly until just barely wilted. Slice cream cheese and spread over top. Pour in the beaten eggs, and keep stirring till eggs are just a smidgen past the runny stage. Serve immediately and often.
Senate votes to empower FDA to enforce drug safety
By a vote of 93 to 1, the Senate recently voted to give the FDA sweeping new powers to enforce drug safety. After the Vioxx tragedy, in which 55,000 Americans were killed by this unsafe drug, consumers have been demanding more oversight of drugs, less rushing them to market, and much less corruption and personnel traffic between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry.
Of course, authorizing the FDA to more effectively police an industry with which it has such intimate ties is comical, but does shift blame off Congress and onto the FDA when the next lethal drug hits the market.
Now also, the Senate voted to double to $2 million dollars the maximum civil fine that could be imposed on a drug company for violation of safety laws. As if that could make a dent in Drug Company coffers. This New York Times article discusses the vote in more depth.