The breakfast that ruins your energy in the office is the same one that saves a cyclist: the paradox of "empty calories"
The busy and stressed life that a good part of society leads can mean that in the mornings the lack of time means that breakfast is quickly resolved with a coffee accompanied by a few cookies or a bun. Something that is known by many that is not healthy, but the clock pressing from behind makes it difficult to find time to make some toast with something healthy on top. However, with this quick breakfast there is a problem: energy ends up falling in a few hours. The empty calories. a term which is increasingly heard to refer to those more processed foods such as pastries, cookies or any sweet that we eat. And here is the great debate, and it raises many questions about its usefulness and if we really eat foods that serve no purpose in the short term beyond making us fat. In Xataka Nutrition science is becoming clearer: it is not that important "that" We have breakfast but at what time do we do it? A roller coaster. To understand what happens in our body at 8:00 in the morning when we eat a coffee and four cookies, we must look at the biochemistry of digestion. And it is that industrial pastries o cookies are mainly composed of refined flours and free sugars. This is a problem because, lacking fiber, protein or quality healthy fats, the body You don’t have to make a great effort to digest them. That is, they are broken down at a high speed in the intestinal tract and enter the blood in the form of glucose almost suddenly. In energy terms, it is the equivalent of trying to heat a house by lighting a fire with sheets of newspaper: it burns very quickly, generates an intense flare, but goes out after a few minutes. {“videoId”:”x7zo910″,”autoplay”:true,”title”:”Added sugars: How to avoid them and improve your diet?”, “tag”:”sugar”, “duration”:”220″} There is no need to demonize to glucose because it is essential as fuel for our body and especially for the brain. However, this sugar peak which is produced by the consumption of these products or others that represent a large release of glucose in the blood, forces the pancreas to secrete a large amount of insulin at once to remove excess blood sugar towards the muscle or adipose tissue. The result here is a drastic drop in glucose just a couple of hours after eating these foods, which causes ravenous hunger or fatigue that makes us need to eat again to have sugar in our body. A continuum of sugar. If you have a slower breakfast with much more varied, healthy and fiber-rich foods, this does not happen. When there is a good amount of fiber, the digestive system has to spend more time processing food and, therefore, the transfer of glucose to the bloodstream is slower and more sustained over time. This gives you a ‘more sustained’ energy throughout the morning without feeling the classic mid-morning ‘slump’. In Xataka We’ve been believing oatmeal is the perfect breakfast for years, but science has a warning: there’s a limit It’s not always bad. Although on many occasions these empty calories are demonized for not having quality nutrients, sometimes it is necessary to have extra quick energy. without thinking about fiber or vitamins that may be presented. This is something we see in the world of sports, where a hyper-sugar chocolate or a cookie can work a miracle when you are at kilometer 80 of a stage, climbing a hill or when the dreaded ‘bird’ is lurking. In this context of high sports performance, fiber or fat would be a hindrance, since they would slow down gastric emptying, stealing blood from the legs to send it to the stomach and causing heaviness or gastrointestinal problems. That glucose spike that in an office causes lethargy after two hours, on the bicycle is immediately burned in the muscle as high-octane fuel, allowing the intensity to be maintained. Images | Bayu Syaits In Xataka | To the question of whether “eating breakfast as soon as you wake up is good for your body”, science offers a clear answer (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news The breakfast that ruins your energy in the office is the same one that saves a cyclist: the paradox of “empty calories” was originally published in Xataka by José A. Lizana .