Barack's Breakfast as a Nutrition Guide
Healthcare Reform by the President’s Example
These are fast food times at America's breakfast table. The day starts wrong, gets worse and ends none too soon. There are abundant suggestions about how to improve health care in America, but problems start with the first meal of the day. The fast is broken along with all of the rules for a sound diet. There are too many carbs, too much caffeine, too high a percentage of inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids, too many empty calories, too little protein, too few vitamins, too few antioxidants and it all comes from too far with too large a carbon footprint. To eat Cherrios with coffee, or bacon and eggs with orange juice, that is the question. Some guidance is needed, especially since nutritionists say that today's breakfast is the first nail in America's health coffin and environmentalists complain that Americans waste energy feeding themselves. Some slow food advice would be a big step toward improving America's health.
The Typical Breakfast is all Sugar
America has the world's longest market isles reserved for colorful boxes of cereals, but the message from the health blogs is that cereal carbs are killers. Our bodies run on a sugar-based economy, but they can't handle a day's supply in the first hour. The problem is that starch is instant sugar and typical breakfast fare is all starch. The sugar in cereal, toast, bagels, doughnuts, pancakes, etc. is all released into blood within an hour. Starch puts sugar into blood as fast as eating the same amount of table sugar. The glut of sugar hits the blood, triggers a surge of insulin, the sugar is dumped into liver and fat cells and the blood sugar crashes. It is no wonder that the nation snoozes, like the kid asleep on his school desk, two hours after the breakfast of champions. The real problem starts as the arteries respond to high blood sugar with the inflammation that fires the American health care costs.
The Inflammatory Diet Starts with an Inflammatory Breakfast
There is a lot of talk about inflammation and disease. The top ten ways of dying in America point the finger at inflammation, but the causes and effects are none too clear to the American public. The cereal breakfast is another American icon under attack. The starch-rich breakfast that produces high blood sugar is inflammatory. Americans need fundamental health care change. We need leadership at the cereal bowl. It is a lot cheaper for the President to give us instructions on how to use spoons, than how to wield scalpels.
America Needs Nutrition Guidance
The bookstores abound with diet advice and biomedical research is slowly producing answers to life's question of, "What's for breakfast?" Fish oil and other sources of long chain omega-3 fatty acids will eventually replace the omega-6-rich vegetable oils that seem to be the source of so much inflammation in the American diet. Michael Pollan in his recent open letter to President Obama, as the new "President and Farmer," encouraged the President to be the enlightened example as the nation's steward of land and environment in the production of food. The President could take that food to his breakfast table and share the experience with America. That would be food for thought, as well as health.
"Barack's Breakfast" as a National Health Care Example
If a discussion of "Barack's Breakfast" could be brought to America each day by the same digital media that brought the President to Washington, America's health would be the beneficiary. Imagine a web site with a recipe for Eggs Benedict, for example, replete with culinary facts on the history of the original recipe, the inflammatory assessment of butter/oils (macadamia nut oil would be an interesting substitute) used in making the Hollandaise sauce, a discussion on the controversy over egg yolk cholesterol, a map showing the source of each ingredient and a total accounting of the carbon cost. This is a modest proposal. President Obama wouldn't have to do much more than pose for an occasional YouTube clip or podcast. The requisite web site for health care change could be maintained and embellished by volunteers led by health care experts, perhaps including the Surgeon General.
This would be preventative medicine on the cheap.
President Obama's Digital Guide to Breakfast
The President can't be expected to help with the choice of drugs or surgical procedures, but a little guidance at breakfast could set Americans straight for the rest of the day. And maybe if started correctly, there would not be as much subsequent need for drugs or surgery.
President Obama seems ready to give some clinics on jump shots, and three pointers may improve at hoops across the nation over the next four years. The question is whether the arteries of the nation will last that long. But if President Barack Obama, as Commander-in-Chef, can start the day with a poached egg covered in Hollandaise, maybe a nation will eat up his advice.
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