Continuous Glucose Monitoring

i’m confused why you considered this healthy?

> white bread in the morning, croissants, dried mangos, excessive amount of fruits, etc.

white bread is basically 100% carbs (converts to sugar). croissants aren’t much better _and_ have unhealthy fat (butter). Dried mangoes pack the sugar of the fruit without much of the fiber and water (speeds up the processing of the sugar).

Healthy breakfast would be like 2 eggs with small slice of toast on the side. Or a small omelette with cheese and mushrooms and spinach. Or perhaps steel cut oats, with thin sliced banana.

Basically - real food that also not loaded with carbs and sugars. Carbs are OK if you actually need them (workouts, etc). Office workers don’t need lots of carbs.

Granted, “healthy” is a spectrum…some people would consider it a win to not smoke, drink soda, etc.

And you’re 100% right about eating fiber first. It greatly slows down sugar absorption/processing! And reduces the sugar spike. That’s an advanced tip most don’t know about.

Dried mangoes don't have fibre? How does drying them remove it?

I thought the same, seems obvious to me but I think a lot of people are still following the food pyramid and "all fat is bad" propaganda.

Although on a perhaps more humourous note: if bread, croissants and sugary fruit is considered a healthy breakfast, I'm dying to know what GP thinks an unhealthy one is.

They do have fibre, but a large part of (non-dried) mangos are water. If you remove the water, then the sugar density per volume/weight goes up a lot.

This makes it easier to consume much larger volumes of dried mangos vs raw mangos. This basically goes for all dried fruits.

Eating three mangoes in a sitting feels like a huge amount of food. Eating three mangos worth of dried mango is pretty easy.

White bread has a bad carbohydrates per protein ratio, but nonetheless it has a much higher protein content than almost any other cereal (i.e. except oats) and a much higher protein content than anything else with a comparable price.

So saying that it is basically 100% carbs is definitely wrong. Good wheat flour for bread has about 1/8 of its weight as proteins, while e.g. maize meal has only about 1/16 and rice between 1/16 and 1/12, but typically towards the lower end of that interval.

White bread is the cheapest source of proteins, but it has the serious disadvantages that its proteins are digested incompletely by most people and the proteins come with too much carbohydrates. The carbohydrates, i.e. the starch, can be removed totally or partially by making a dough and washing it, but that consumes a lot of water and time.

Otherwise, I agree with what you have said.

White bread could be combined with something that contains mostly proteins, possibly with fat, e.g. chicken breast or eggs, but then bread retains no advantages from its higher protein content (except of lowering the total cost of the food), so it should better be replaced by a healthier source of carbohydrates, i.e. maize or rice.

thank you for catching that, i misspoke regarding the fiber. My bad.

One other thing to be aware of is dehydrated foods are less satiating (lacking water). This makes it easier to eat more of them in one sitting and consume more sugar.

Why is butter an unhealthy fat?

i’m not a licensed nutritionist so i’ll defer to the experts. My recall on the details is not the best, simply what i remember from a few nutritionist sessions my wife had. :)

What i do know is white bread for breakfast wouldn’t be considered healthy by any nutritionist i’ve spoken to. Unless it’s paired with something else like eggs. And comparing it to cereal feels absurd, since cereal is loaded with extra sugars on purpose. Except for plain cornflakes and a few healthy brands at whole foods / trader joes.

Butter is primarily saturated fat, it’s often considered unhealthy due to its potential to raise LDL cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease. Nothing wrong with butter - in moderation. And it’s great to get healthy fats into your diet!

Healthy fats are monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (“unsaturated”). Found in things like nuts, olive oil, avocado oil, fish, etc.

By "cereal" I have meant cereal plants, i.e. wheat, rye, barley, oats, rice, maize, millet, sorghum and so on, in their raw ingredient forms, i.e. as grains, meal or flour form.

Cereals have been the main sources of energy in human food for the last ten thousand years, and among them wheat (because oats is only a minor crop) has also been a non-negligible source of proteins during all this time.

I have not referred to "breakfast cereals", which are the most obvious example of garbage food provided by industrial production.

(Many decades ago, there has been a time when I was too focused on professional problems and too careless about health and nutrition, and for a long time I have been eating some Nestlé breakfast cereals. After realizing the errors of my ways and blacklisting breakfast cereals, together with other junk food, like fruit juices or fruit yogurt, I was surprised by the quick improvements brought by this decision.)

oh i see. I’d probably refer to that category as simply “grains” or “cereal grains”.

I’m in agreement!

As another poster has said, due to it high content of saturated fat. Butter remains healthier than butter substitutes, e.g. margarine.

Small amounts of butter should not be a cause of concern, but only when butter or other dairy products are the major source of fat for someone.

As a personal anecdote, I believe that the composition of the fat one eats is very important for cardio-vascular health, because some years ago I had been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis.

This has scared me, so I have analyzed what unhealthy habits I might have had. At that time, I was eating very large quantities of dairy products. I could not identify anything else that was suspicious, so I have stopped eating dairy (except whey protein or milk protein, which are fat free) and I have ensured from that day on, that more than 90% of my daily intake of fats comes from a mixture of vegetable oils where oleic acid is dominant and essential fatty substances are in adequate amounts.

After a year, I no longer had any symptoms of atherosclerosis and there were also other obvious health improvements, because some signs of bad peripheral circulation, e.g. cold feet, had also vanished.

Few things in human nutrition are certain, due to the impossibility of doing experiments with humans, which could result in death or permanent health problems.

Nevertheless, it is most likely that fat should provide a good fraction of the total amount of energy, i.e. between 1/4 and 1/2, e.g. around 1/3, and the fatty acid profile should be thus that monosaturated fatty acids, i.e. mainly oleic acid, must be dominant.

Examples of food sources with fats where oleic acid is dominant are: high-oleic sunflower oil, olive oil, avocado oil, several kinds of nuts, e.g. cashew nuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachio, peanuts.

While such a fat with oleic acid must provide most energy, there must also be fat sources which provide essential fatty substances, e.g. linoleic acid, vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids. (As an example of healthy daily intake, I cook my own food and most of the fat comes from the oil I mix into food after cooking, which for a day contains 50 mL of high-oleic sunflower oil or of EV olive oil + 20 mL of classic cold-pressed sunflower oil + 10 mL of cod liver oil. The cold-pressed sunflower oil is for linoleic acid and vitamin E, the cod liver oil for DHA, EPA and vitamin D.)

Makes sense. Perhaps you were thinking of juice.

Very high in AGEs

> What i do know is white bread for breakfast wouldn’t be considered healthy by any nutritionist i’ve spoken to. Unless it’s paired with something else like eggs

I guess try speaking with a French nutritionist? Typical breakfast here is a "tartine" which is baguette with butter and jam. Eggs for breakfast are nonexistant. And yet very few people are fat.

The obesity epidemic is (a) very recent and (b) mostly US-specific. Something I don't understand is why people keep looking for culprits among things that are (a) very old and (b) popular worldwide.

People have been eating white bread for millenia and still do all around the world. It's unlikely that white bread suddenly became evil and decided to kill people.

Look for things that are new like sugary drinks. Or better, new AND US-specific like HFCS added everywhere including bread. Huge portions are also new and so are private cars.

I don't know what's the main driver but I'm pretty sure it's not white bread or butter.

You’re suggesting a french nutritionist would _encourage_ eating a baguette with butter as a healthy meal? That’s surprising to me. I suppose it _can_ be OK for a person who’s in good health already, but i wouldn’t purposely choose it and feel healthy about it lol. I can think of many alternatives that actually offer nutrition too. Like a banana, or baguette with a small side of sautéed peppers or mushrooms.

I certainly wouldn’t suggest it to someone that’s already sick with diabetes or obesity for example.

I have in-laws in paris, and i will say they walk as much as NYers. In other words, they are not sedentary like most americans. Portions sizes vary a lot too.

I agree with you that sugary things that are new and trendy do a lot of damage!

> i’m confused why you considered this healthy?

Ha, indeed :)

I admit I was completely oblivious to what carbs, proteins, fibers, and fat do to your metabolism.

I thought controlling weight was enough. I was in the healthy BMI range, and had stopped eating added sugar a decade ago, so in my mind I was a role-model for eating "healthy". Whatever I was doing, it must be working, right?

Then my annual check-up pointed that I was entering pre-diabetic terrain...

That's what prompted me to go on a journey and discovering that it's not (just) about the weight -- what you eat matters. You need to understand what fiber/ protein/ fat/ carbs do to your metabolism, the role of insulin in controlling your blood sugar levels, that sugars are sugars, irrespective if they come in a slice of chocolate cake or a dried mango (ofc aside from fibers/vitamins), etc.

Understanding more about glycemic spikes also helped me understand about sugar crash, cravings, the sequencing of food, effect of moving after eating, and more.

I know this is all pretty obvious in hindsight, but it was a blindspot for me. It's incredible that it's not part of basic education for kids (at least it wasn't for me).

Exactly. Dried fruits (and dried mangos in particular) may seem healthy, but you should treat them like candy. In fact it's worse than candy - at least chocolate has fat, which makes you feel full, while dried mango is pure sugars and carbs.

You can easily eat 100g of dried mango, not realizing it packs 80g of carbs (!). That's enough to create a huge glycemic spike, followed by an immediate crash half hour later.

In the end of the day, fructose and sucrose are sugars after all, so treat them accordingly.

ps: same for fruit juices. Outside of a few vitamins (which you probably don't need, if you eat a healthy diet), juices are not much better than sodas, and pack a tremendous amount of sugar.

> Or perhaps steel cut oats, with thin sliced banana.

Can anyone explain how the thickness of the banana slices affects the healthiness of the meal for me?

kudos to you for taking a proactive interest in your health. I feel the same way about education in schools. The nutritional education I did receive in school was really poor.

it doesn’t, just makes for fancy presentation. I usually layer thin slices of banana on top of half of the bowl.

Oatmeal by itself looks gross LOL. For me it helps to make it look more appealing. Do what works for you. Some people like putting some berries in their oatmeal or topping with some almonds.

Lmao, I love the honesty combined with me trying to find deeper meaning where there was none.

It's delicious BTW.