Diet - Eggs or no eggs?

@fritzo
Love stewed apples. And I often do the poor man's version - I cut up the apple and sprinkle cinnamon on it!

Dates have a bad reputation for glycemic index, they have more sugar for their size and apparently more fructose than many others. Don't some people find honey a preferable sweetener?

@mjp0512 IIRC, the 2011 Richman study (using an existing dataset of self-reported info from >27K male doctors in the late 1990s and early 2000s) found no correlation between egg consumption and being diagnosed with prostate cancer; the only statistically-significant correlation was between egg consumption and progression from non-metastatic to metastatic prostate cancer.

However, since only about 0.04% of patients progressed (eggs or no eggs), the odds of *not* progressing from non-metastatic to metastatic PCa were over 99.9% for this cohort with or without higher egg consumption. 🤷

@carbcounter Whole dates are low GI and medium GL (surprisingly) — while they taste very sweet, the fibre in them slows sugar consumption a bit, and most of their sugar is fructose rather than glucose.

If you cook/stew them, though — as with other fruit — the GI and GL rise significantly, since they're effectively predigested for you.

(Again, that doesn't mean don't ever eat apple sauce or date squares; just be aware they're going to have a much bigger impact on your blood sugar than raw apples and dates, even if there's no sugar added.)

@northoftheborder
But free fructose, though it goes through a different pathway, is ultimately a worse problem than it is from sucrose. I was unclear on that early on, and I'm not sure what the current textbook is on it - or how that is accounted for GI/GL numbers. As with the cream, perhaps not comprehensively.

@northoftheborder
My own concern is exactly the pre-diabetes.
I've found that cream and also beef fat may help digestion (and taste good) but may aggravate blood glucose probably through the other mechanism, increasing insulin resistance.

I guess a half-cup of dry (organic!!) oatmeal is going to be more like a full cup of puffy Cheerios, but two cups may be pushing it. A friend of mine has diabetes, only recently under control with injected Ozempic, but he was starting breakfast with a full cup of dry oatmeal made up with a ton of berries ... says his wife insists. Not a good way for a diabetic to start out the day. Portion control is half or three quarters or more, of diabetic diet control.

If Cheerios really have that high an effective GI in spite of mitigating factors then the stuff has been pure evil for its entire existence, even people with no diabetes should probably avoid big blood glucose excursions, that may be exactly what eventually triggers diabetes in the first place.

(and was I guilty of this when young, omg yes)

@carbcounter Your friend may want to skip breakfast completely; it is NOT, contrary to the old saying, ‘the most important meal of the day’.
Sugars/starches eaten at dinner are stored overnight in the form of glycogen; your body will use that first for fuel the next morning.
But if you eat breakfast, your body will use that glucose first and the stored glycogen will go on to be stored as fat.
I’ve been doing this for 50 years and now I find that it is called ‘intermittent fasting’…every gd thing gets a label these days…
Phil

@heavyphil As I understand it, the glycogen won't get converted to fat until you have too much if it stored, regardless of what time of day you eat. But yes, it's fine to skip breakfast if that works for you.

Regardless, I think exercising *before* breakfast will burn down your existing glycogen stores because there's not much glucose available when you haven't eaten all night. Exercising *after* breakfast will burn off the glucose from breakfast before it gets converted to more glycogen. So it's sort-of a wash. 🤷

@northoftheborder Exactly, it’s a wash IF you are eating breakfast…If not, that glycogen stored the night before will be depleted if you exercise - or even if you don’t. So at least you are doing something to put a dent in the storage mechanism before you eat lunch and then dinner.
I have friends who absolutely HAVE to eat breakfast, so you do what works best for you, right?
Don’t get me wrong, I can eat at any hour of the day - and happily!😋 - whether I’m hungry or not. So this is a discipline I’ve forced on myself to keep trim and like any habit, it just becomes part of your routine. Best,
Phil

@heavyphil I don't think we're disagreeing. I'm just suggesting there's nothing magical about skipping breakfast (for a while, skipping lunch worked for me): in either case, if you eat less you burn more glycogen stores and/or add less to them.

The risk is that reducing consumption by skipping meals (instead of reducing portion size) can lead to more blood sugar peaks and troughs, which eventually lead to strong cravings that induce more snacking or bigger portion sizes. That's why restriction diets eventually fail for most people, even if they show exciting results for a few weeks/months at the start.

With my mobility restrictions from the spinal injury, long-term ADT, and family history of type 2 diabetes, I'm at high risk despite being fairly active for a man my age. Losing 20 lb would help.

But I'm coming at it the other way around this time: first stabilise my blood sugar to minimize peaks and troughs and the resulting cravings, then worry about reducing my weight, very gradually. It's not primarily about the number on the scale.