Six common beliefs addressed, Part 20

1. Should breakfast be avoided? 

No. 

Breakfast is a great way to regulate blood glucose. If you are a person whose circadian rhythm prefers breakfast, and it is when you are most hungry, take advantage of that, because it is actually a very metabolically healthy practice to have. You are at an advantage. Those who eat their largest meal, earlier in the day, tend to be and remain lean.

This is most likely due to insulin sensitivity being at its highest earlier in the day. Eating earlier also allows for insulin levels to already be low in the evenings. If insulin is already low before you go to bed, it will go even lower during sleep. If you eat a large meal before bedtime, your insulin will never reach those extremely low levels during sleep. It is these extremely low levels that break resistance because low insulin does not interfere with fasting blood glucose levels. 

2. Should meal portions be controlled?

Meal portions are controlled best through intermittent fasting and time restricted eating, not through calorie counting. Cutting out all of the snacks and multiple meals a day, reduces the amount of food you eat automatically, without the need for any other type of intervention.

3. Someone told me that we will always be sick, because of what our mother's ate in the womb.

What our mothers ate in the womb impacts how our bodies function and which pathways are upregulated or downregulated according to that environment. Babies whose mothers had a diet of excess glucose, are already born with some form of insulin resistance and a pancreas with abnormal beta cells.

But, just because this occurs does not mean that you are destined to a live a life of bad health. The body adapts to whatever environment it is put in and just because it behaves and develops a certain way, due to what it was exposed to in the womb, does not mean it will continue to behave this way if its environment changes later.

That's epigenetics. How we are today is not how we will be tomorrow, as it was once thought. The body is constantly evolving with its environment and genes are not written in stone. Once that baby is born, and he is given a proper diet, his body changes and he becomes healthy.

4. As long as you're using "healthy" fats, your health will improve.

As long as you are addressing poor blood glucose regulation, your health will improve. 

"Healthy fats" are not doing anything to improve your health, except for the fact that you are no longer consuming "vegetable" oils. "Vegetable" oils are known to cause metabolic disruption by interfering with the fat cell's proper insulin resistance.

5. Are only proteins inflammatory?

Many things can be inflammatory. 

There are certain hormonal states that are inflammatory. Being too sedentary is inflammatory, just like being overactive. Toxins are inflammatory. Autoimmune conditions are inflammatory. Chronic, abnormal expression of metabolic hormones is inflammatory. Being in a chronic anabolic state is inflammatory. Completely healthy, normal, non-pathological states can also be inflammatory. 

The body needs to go through periods of hyper inflammation and hypo inflammation. This is how it regulates its inflammatory pathways. This obsession with lowering inflammation has gotten out of hand. You want to lower chronic, systemic, pathological inflammation, not just any inflammation.

As you can see, many things promote inflammation, so if you have it, do not assume it's something you ate. It can be a multitude of things. Some of them can be exacerbated by what you ate, but they can be also originating from other factors.

6. Should I exercise in a fasted state?

If you practice short term, intermittent fasting, for weight loss or reversal of diabetes, you can exercise fasted. Watch your electrolytes carefully, so you do not dehydrate.

Having said that, there are many myths concerning the benefits of exercise in a fasted state and I broke them down in this post.