Nurse Angry hates breakfast

So you’re not hungry in the morning and you don’t want to eat breakfast?

Nurse Angry says you’re in good company. Whoever started (and is still perpetuatuating) the myth that everyone has to eat breakfast  should be given 50 lashes with the proverbial wet noodle (they can eat it afterwards if they want) and a lesson in modern physiology and nutrition. Nurse Angry is no friend of breakfast and doesn’t eat it most of the time these days. That gives her an extra 45 minutes of sleep on workdays, and though it was (mostly) pleasant to sit with the family in the morning, she doesn’t have to pretend to enjoy her oatmeal anymore. Not eating breakfast even saves money and you don’t have to carry stuff you don’t eat home from the store, either.  What a great way to “fast”- if you’re not hungry, don’t eat!

A randomized controlled trial to study the effects of breakfast on energy intake, physical activity, and body fat in women who are nonhabitual breakfast eaters

If Nurse Angry should happen to be hungry at breakfast time, she eats. If hunger strikes at work, she eats nuts if she has any, otherwise she just waits until lunchtime.

This not eating breakfast thing is relatively new for Nurse Angry. She is a big fan of Dr Jason Fung and now thinks fasting is a great idea for allowing your insulin levels to go down and  letting your body do other stuff instead of digesting food. Digestion is time and energy consuming for your poor little body. So keep that in mind if you’re sick and really un-hungry but there’s someone telling you that you “have to eat”. Ignore them.

Somewhere along the way we got the idea that being hungry was a dangerous state.  And maybe it was, long ago when most of us didn’t have three or four 7Elevens within walking distance.  One situation many people might recognize as slightly horrifying is when they are not be able to provide their child (or worse, somebody else’s child) with a snack the minute said child was hungry.  Don’t starve the children!

Nurse Angry read a weight loss tip recently in a women’s magazine. It was to never allow yourself to get hungry between meals, because that’s when you might eat something you’ll regret.  Nurse Angry begs her readers to reflect upon the wisdom of this strategy.

She would instead recommend making friends with real feelings of hunger and eating when hungry, making sure to eat enough fat and protein for good nutritional value and a feeling of actual satiation and satiety that will last until the next meal.  Nurse Angry has personal experience of this and she much prefers the relationship she now has with food.

Breakfast is the meal where it’s easiest to load up on carbs (especially in the form of sugar). So take a look at what you’re giving to the kids, and maybe adults giving breakfast a miss if not hungry  isn’t such a stupid idea after all.

All that being said, Nurse Angry does love a nice bowl of steel-cut oats, just not in the early morning, please.

More (seriously) bad stuff from Nurse Angry

Sweden is the land of strapping, healthy vikings, right? That’s what even the Swedes still want to think, but Nurse Angry has been here for 25 years and has watched the metamorphosis. People in Sweden are now, well…fat.

Nurse Angry has looked on in horror at the stupefying amounts of sugar consumed by the children around her, but she is even more distressed by how these amounts have become “normal”.  Nurse Angry turned herself into a persona non grata at school by questioning whether the kids should be given leftover cookies every afternoon. As if that wasn’t enough to make the people at the after school program despise her, she then contacted the principal. Who agreed with her(!)

Nurse Angry also wrote an email to the other  parents in her daughter’s class at one point, pointing out that it maybe wasn’t necessary for the children to eat 8-10 (or more) cookies when there’s an event at school. This missive was met with total silence. Not that she’s against the idea of being the crazed American anti-sugar parent by any means, but that subject just didn’t fly. She let it go.

Nurse Angry is currently on a literature binge that started when she was trying to understand why people of Asian origin more easily get type 2 diabetes (the insulin resistance kind). She was also trying to get a grip on the whole LCHF phenomenon. Being a vegetarian, Nurse Angry is basically not invited to the low-carb party, but as a seasoned gatecrasher, she felt like it needed some investigation.

In an attempt to excuse herself from reading the next book club book, Nurse Angry emailed her friend Nurse Nancy (the literary district nurse and accidental hemorrhoid expert), explaining that she had been plowing through books such as Ann Fernholm’s Ett sötare blod and Det sötaste vi har, Andreas Eenfeldt’s Matrevolutionen, John Yudkin’s classic Pure, White and Deadly, Robert Lustig’s Fat Chance, and most recently, Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. And that the end was nowhere in sight. So Grief Is the thing with feathers (or any other work of fiction) is not on Nurse Angry’s current reading list.

Nurse Nancy wrote back: “Any bad calories  that were surprises? Some ways NOT rocket science.”

And if Nurse Angry is completely honest, she will say no, there weren’t. Not at this point. But throughout her reading spree she has gotten more than a few interesting (and some shocking) surprises, and not just about bad calories. The first couple of books were a warm-up, so to say, as it takes  a while for a new subject to become understandable on a higher level. Nurse Angry certainly knew that sugar was very bad indeed, but maybe not just how very, very bad. And the idea of carbs in general as potentially undesirable fodder for human beings was a new one on Nurse Angry. The insights gained would chill the heart of any vegetarian, and Nurse Angry is no exception (more on that in another post which will be called The Recovering Vegetarian).

Nurse Angry certainly did not realize that the dietary guidelines she learned in nursing school are basically a bunch of mumbo jumbo that was intended to prevent heart disease, but ended up just making everyone fat and miserable. That in itself is enough to turn your hair blue, but there’s more. Nurse Angry now thinks that low carb eating, which sounds like mumbo jumbo, is totally ok and does not turn people into greasy blobs of cholesterol, as cholesterol was not the problem in the first place. Does anyone else remember wondering why anyone would bother counting carbohydrates back in the 70’s and 80’s? We were counting calories, duh?  Well, now Nurse Angry has understood.

Fat-free anything and low fat/low calorie diets are so not helpful. The “eat less, move more” theory of weight loss needs to be completely canned at this point as it has caused more than its fair share of human suffering. Nurse Angry still thinks you should exercise, as it brings a wealth of health benefits. Unfortunately weight loss is not one of them.

She suggests everyone start doing some seriously selfish reading on the subject of nutrition right now, because government, the health care systems of the world, Big Pharma and the food industry don’t look like they’re going to be making changes any time soon. There’s too much money involved for some, and others are already having enough trouble winning elections without rocking the sugar boat. Once you get started reading it’s hard to stop. Seek out sources you find reliable. Or check out Nurse Angry’s new hero, nephrologist Jason Fung. Or Dr. Robert Lustig. Or Dr. Zoe Harcombe. Or Dr. Georgia Ede. Or Dr. Eric Westman. If you speak Swedish you can follow Dr. Annika Dahlqvist. Or why not Dr Andreas Eenfeldt on dietdoctor.com or kostdoktorn.se?

Find out more about metabolic syndrome, insulin and insulin resistance, dietary connections with Alzheimer’s, cancer and much more. It’s fascinating reading and you get to make up your own mind. Nurse Angry thinks the future looks hopeful.