Bruce Jenner’s greatest accomplishment was winning the decathlon in the 1976 Olympic Games, earning him the title of “World’s Greatest Athlete.” Since then, he’s made a lot of bad, or at least odd, decisions. Examples include
Keeping Up with the Kardashians, starring in a bizarre musical with the Village People, and getting a nose job that made him look like Trixie from the Speed Racer cartoon. But the worst thing Jenner did was appear on the cover of a
Wheaties box. Sure, the “Breakfast of Champions” served to celebrate the accomplishments of this great athlete, but it also made Bruce Jenner the poster boy of poor eating.
What’s my problem with Wheaties? First, it’s a grain-based product, mixed with just the right amounts of sugar, salt, corn syrup and trisodium phosphate (which is often used as a stain remover and degreaser). And let’s not forget about gluten, which for those who are gluten sensitive may contribute to a host of health issues, including autoimmune and neurological problems. For more on this, I recommend
Dangerous Grains: Why Gluten Cereal May Be Hazardous to Your Health by James Braley, MD, and Ron Hoggan, MA (Avery, 2002).
Wheaties was created in 1922 in Minnesota when a mill worker accidentally spilled wheat bran on a hot stove and turned the product into flakes. In fact, the original name of this product was “Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes.” It came to market in 1924, and in 1934 the General Mills company decided to promote the product with sports celebrities, starting with Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees.
Wheaties is promoted as a breakfast cereal to “Jumpstart Your Metabolism”®. One advertisement for the product explains that after sleeping all night your body needs to “re-charge for the day,” and as such you should “do your whole grain duty with a serving of whole grain Wheaties for breakfast.” Although such cereal may be good enough for Rebecca Black to sing about in her
Friday music video, which was watched 167 million times on Youtube.com, General Mills decided a few years ago that athletes had special cereal needs. As a result, General Mills consulted with NFL quarterback Peyton Manning and NBA star Kevin Garnett to help them develop
Wheaties Fuel. This product has twice the calories, more fiber and an extra 10 grams of sugar “…to deliver long-lasting energy to help fuel your needs.” By the way, Manning has a degree in speech communication and Garnett never went to college.
The High-Protein Power Breakfast
In addition to using athletes as spokespersons, cereal companies have marketed their products by emphasizing that there is considerable research supporting the importance of a good breakfast in maintaining high energy levels and also in reducing the risk of obesity. And this is true – in fact, one study published in the October 2010 issue of
European Journal of Clinical Nutrition in the UK that involved 4,326 secondary school children found that 32 percent of the students did not eat breakfast, and that these children were more likely to be obese than those who ate before school. Interestingly, the obesity problem was worse for females. “Girls who never ate breakfast were nearly twice as likely to be obese compared with those who always did.” So a breakfast by itself is important, but as shown by my Wheaties example, what’s also important is what the breakfast contains – and the key is protein.
Scientists at the University of Missouri conducted a study on overweight teen girls who regularly skip breakfast. The teens were divided into three groups for this study: One group continued to skip breakfast, the second group switched to a typical milk-and-cereal breakfast, and the third group was given a high-protein breakfast. In this case, a high-protein breakfast meant yogurt and protein-enriched waffles with syrup – okay, so it’s not exactly
the meat and nuts breakfast, but the findings are still important.
The results were important for two reasons. The first is that they corroborated previous studies by showing that the higher-protein breakfast improved both appetite control and overall satiety: The teens were less likely to consume excess calories and sugary snacks between meals and made better food choices throughout the afternoon and evening.
The second reason this study is important is that they also conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the subjects’ brains before the subjects ate lunch. They examined the hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate, parahippocampus, insula and middle prefrontal cortex activation – areas of the brain associated with reward- and pleasure-driven eating behaviors. The high-protein group had the least activation of the regions of the brain that correlated with reward and food-motivated behavior. Lead researcher Dr. Heather Leidy, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, also noted that the high-protein participants improved their attention, focus and memory. The researchers believe that these findings could be very important in better understanding the neurological effects of different food choices.
Sorry, Mr. Jenner, but the school of thought that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie is shown to be woefully inadequate. High-protein breakfasts help individuals make better food choices throughout the rest of the day and help to address one of the most difficult components of any fat loss program: the mental aspect.
REFERENCES:
Leidy, H. J., Lepping, R. J., Savage, C. R., & Harris, C. T. (2011 May). Neural responses to visual food stimuli after a normal vs. higher protein breakfast in breakfast-skipping teens: A pilot fMRI study.
Obesity. doi:10.1038/oby.2011.108.