I try to spread good news like butter. Also, I love to pluck unhealthy headlines from the media forest and wrap them up with duct tape, capturing it all for later analysis. Let's cover the following, and look for common themes:
So you go to sleep at night thinking "I'm so glad I had that low-fat cookie for desert, now I can breathe easy and sleep softly." You usually get around seven hours of sleep, but tomorrow you have to wake up for a out-of-state weaving techniques convention so you are only going to get 4 hours tonight. In the morning, you almost make scrambled eggs but instead opt for a bowl of Fruit Loops and some white toast. Um, yum!
After a few hours on the road, you truly, madly, deeply crave not on a Savage Garden CD but the latest in the ever-advancing low-fat Cheez-it product line-up. Why? Several reasons.
In the 70's, the FDA asked that Americans cut down on saturated fat intake. Not only did we oblige, but so did food manufacturers, blessing us with low-fat gifts at the turn of every supermarket aisle. The result: obesity rates doubled, diabetes has a huge grin on its face, and heart disease is donating plaques of achievement to the middle-aged all over the United States.
This is not to say that saturated fat is good for you necessarily, and the article points out the real reason for the perfect downward spiral thrown by Lazy-boy Monday morning quarterbacks: processed carbohydrates. Foods that are high on the glycemic-index. High glycemic foods quickly raise blood sugar levels and stimulate fat storage, leaving you hungrier at your next meal. White breads, doughnuts, cookies, etc. Um, yum!
Aside from picking foods low in glycerin, what can you do to regulate hunger? Regulate your ghrelin hormones. I know this is going to be a hard one for teens. Ghrelin is a hormone that increases your appetite, usually right before a meal. There are a few lifestyle choices that can swing ghrelin levels; to increase, go short on sleep, to decrease, eat some chicken kids in the morning.
Ghrelin
Subjects of the sleep study ate more and were more likely to overindulge on snacks and carbohydrates after a night of insufficient sleep. Basically, someone spikes your orange juice with ghrelin. So grab some eggs. Subjects of the egg study ate 100 calories less at a buffet three hours after an egg-filled breakfast, and 400 calories less in the following 24-hour period. Eggs lower your ghrelin levels.
So there it is, the proof is in the ghrelin.
