hold the bread, pass the butter

Have you ever stayed at a hotel or motel that offers free breakfast? I just returned from a week-long road trip to Sedona, Arizona. Our motel offered a complete breakfast – eggs, sausage, fruit and plenty of those ubiquitous high-glycemic starches –cereals, breads, bagels, waffles, and such. It was easy to eat the healthy foods and pass on the starches. When I first started to avoid eating high-glycemic carbohydrates, I had a hard time convincing myself that those yummy starches such as cakes, cookies, muffins and pasta were not good for me. But then, when I noticed how they made me feel – less energy, more anxious, it became easier to just say no. Today, I view sandwich bread, bagels, and tortillas as merely wrappers. To eat, peel off the wrapper and eat what’s inside.

On our drive back to SLC, we stopped for the night at a motel in Page, AZ near Lake Powell. The breakfast “menu” was only high-glycemic starches, coffee, tea, and milk. Seems the motel’s nutritional advisors haven’t gotten the message yet – high-glycemic starches aren’t in any way good for you, but rather supply only “dangerous” calories. I’m hoping those menu planners read some of new food research. An article in this month’s May 2010 Scientific American is titled, Carbs Against Cardio: refined carbs bad: saturated fat not so bad. The bottom line, “hold the bread, and pass the butter.” The article states that “processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does.”

Speaking of those “dangerous calories,” several new research studies are positively scary and somewhat macabre.
Rats on junk food pass cancer down the generations. www.newscientist.com
Junk food turns rats into addicts. www.sciencenews.org
Rats fat on junk food would rather starve than eat healthy foods. www.sciencedaily.com
The junk food in these experiments is high-fat and high-glycemic – the kind found in the snack section of the grocery store. I need to tell you that these articles make me feel a guilty about what I fed my son as he was growing up. However, he instinctively wanted eggs for breakfast and loved them so much that he learned how to cook them himself when he was two (I managed the stove, he scrambled the eggs) and he really didn’t care for that boxed cereal. Seems his instincts were right on.

A second article in the same issue of Scientific American, Genetic in the Gut: Intestinal microbes drive obesity, is fascinating and may help allay some folk’s guilt about being over-sized. Our digestion relies on a vast array of intestinal microbes. Some synthesize vitamins, others break down certain compounds in foods. We depend on those microbes. But, research is showing that some genetic mutations in some intestinal microbes can lead to insulin resistance, obesity, and the symptoms of metabolic syndrome: large waists, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. They don’t know what causes the microbes to mutate – it could be random, they could be adapting to a junk food diet, or the answer could be something else entirely different. At present, there isn’t a magic formula to correct the genetic mutations but I’ll bet the researchers are working long intense hours to find a safe and easy way to help us lose those obesity-causing microbes. Stay tuned.

And this from The New York Times: Being fat is bad for your brain. In this blog, Olivia Judson cites several research studies that show that people who were fat around the middle at age 40 were more likely to succumb to dementia in their 70s. You can read this blog at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/brain-damage/?emc=eta1. Now I need to tell you that my father had dementia and he was never overweight in his life. So this kind of research deals with percentages and possibilities and isn’t necessarily so for everyone.

On a more fun note, new research says that spending even 5 minutes in the great outdoors or in their backyard improves a person’s mental health. Just five minutes. So when you walk to the mailbox, linger and smell the flowers. No wonder folks who garden enjoy it so much.

My favorite dessert these days – yes, I still eat dessert – is a small mini scoop of ice coconut cream. It doesn’t contain dairy or sugar, but rather is made from coconut milk and agave nectar, so it’s low-glycemic. It’s very creamy, cold, and delicious. I found it first at the health food grocery store, but now our local regular grocer stocks it in the specialty area of the frozen food aisle. With summer coming, it’s time to bring out my Frosty maker. I freeze pure fruit juice and then put it in the machine to make a sort of sno-cone or sorbet. Refreshing, cold, and delicious.

Check out the April 30 post on www.Budgetsmartgirl.com/posts/ in which Susan reviews my new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Well on a Budget.

Also, check out my blog at http://lucybeale-weight-loss.blogspot.com/. My newest post is about how people slow down their metabolism.

Have a glorious spring,

Lucy
Lucy@lucybeale.com