BREAKFAST WAS INVENTED BY RICE KRISPIES

I want to take you back to several hundred-thousand years ago when the land was totally devoid of any golden arches and no sign of a Starbucks was anywhere to be seen. That meant the only food to fill your belly was the food that you hunted and gathered yourself.

With stealth you got within arrow’s range of your target, but the arrow sails wide of the mark and in the blink of an eye your prey runs away. Your family has also had little to no luck this day gathering berries, acorns and anything else that will make a meal. It’s dark now. Time to build a fire, for it’s quite possible that you are now the prey. On this night, dinner will be a drink of water.

There’s an old saying that says a person can live for three minutes without oxygen, three hours in a snow storm when you forget your coat, three days without water and 3 weeks without food (hope you’ve got a good covering of fat). What this tells me is that eating was a very irregular event, so feast or famine was the norm.

Today for many fasting is defined as the time between breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner. Not fasting is when you fill the in between hours with eating snacks. I think that fasting is more clearly imprinted on our genes than three squares a day that consist of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The other day I was reading an article in one of my favorite magazines called, Acres. The article, ‘Health in Your own Hands’ by, Dr. Joseph Mercola had one paragraph that validated what I think. He wrote,

‘The whole strategy behind intermittent fasting is to replicate our ancestral eating patterns by going through regular periods of not eating. The problem with eating all day is that it causes your body to forget how to burn fat because you never have to. Your body has about 12 hours of sugar stored as Glycogen in your muscles and Liver but when you eat constantly you never run out of Glycogen so you have no need to burn the fat you are storing for a famine so it just builds up in large quantities. The solution is to restrict your eating window to about 6-8 hours. You stop eating at least 3 hours you go to bed, sleep for 8 hours, skip breakfast and wait until lunchtime for your first meal of the day’.

I’m tired of being hood winked by the breakfast food consortium. This band of charlatans that in their quest to raise the bottom line for the likes of Kellogg’s, General Mills, Post and all the rest that have taken every last ounce of nutritional value out of breakfast in search of profit by using what most youngsters can’t resist: SUGAR AND CARBOHYDRATES to addict them.

That’s what I think. And if you follow their instructions carefully mom and dad, you will have given your kids a good start down the obesity trail. This trail has all sorts of wonderful life altering consequences to encounter along the way. A good place to start is with diabetes, then you’ll get lots of trips to the dentist and playing outside loses out to video games and watching a TV set, and somehow a little self-confidence disappears along the way. But what’s a mother to do? Well, we might start by asking ourselves how important is breakfast anyway?

We know what the answer will be if we pose the question to the ‘Cereal Mafia’. They will trot out a legion of nutritionists, all with Dr. preceding their name. Then the public relations people will gallop out to make sure the white wash is applied correctly so that the sanctity of Fruit Loops is secure. Then we can all go home reassured that the best thing that a person can do for his body is to have a bowl full of ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’.

I was raised in an era when if you wanted to be a cowboy, you had to smoke Marlboro cigarettes. And if you liked to listen to music on the radio (before TV), you could tune in and listen to the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, and any baseball player, to be worth his salt, had too in hail a pack or two of Camel’s a day.

We all know what an insidious disaster that was on the health of ‘We The People’. What’s amazing is how many hundreds of years the Tobacco Cartel was able to keep us all puffing on those coffin nails til’ the cost of participating in that deadly game could no longer be squelched by the Tobacco Kingdom. So today I can travel this land of ours without getting smoke in my eyes.

I’m hoping that lightening might strike twice, and why not? First it happened to cigarettes, they went the way of Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall; so why not Cheerios, Fruit Loops and Sugar Frosted Flakes? Come on mom and dad, back each other up and buy some apples and a few bananas. Then, take all the junk food, put it in the garbage and when the little munchkin reaches in the cupboard for that box full of obesity fixings they find an apple instead. Then lightening might strike twice.

See ya,

Jack