Breakfast Article on T-Nation Confirms I Was Raised Right

An article toda proves that mama had my eating right all along :
Tip: The Testosterone-Boosting Breakfast

Bacon, eggs and toast were pretty dang regular while I was growing up.
Yet I had a doctor and dietician insist that was a horrible choice.
Maybe in my situation it wasn’t optimal, but dammit it’s great to see an article about what a good choice it was!

There’s few smells better to wake up to than eggs and bacon cooking. I may prefer the smell of burning gunpowder but this breakfast is THE runner up, especially since burning gunpowder isn’t a menu item :wink:

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Doctors are brilliant people who are (most often) out of their lane in giving diet advice.

Dietitians, on the other hand, are the people who should have a better handle on what constitutes a “healthy diet” but, sadly, most of our dietary research is badly flawed and/or wrongly interpreted, and therefore we still have nutrition experts who believe that a diet composed of 2 Slim-Fast shakes, a Weight Watchers microwave dinner and a scoop of fat-free ice cream is healthier than

Breakfast: 4 eggs, 4 slices bacon, 2 slices toast
Lunch: 4 oz roast beef and jack cheese on sourdough bread with lettuce, tomato, onion
Dinner: 12 oz steak, 1 large sweet potato cooked in coconut oil, 20 asparagus spears
Snack: 8 oz frozen fruit with 2 Tbsp drizzle of heavy cream

For a strength athlete, or anyone that’s moderately active and needs protein, that’s a pretty solid day’s worth of eating. Yet, the typical nutritionist’s response would be something like:

“Eggs have too much cholesterol, replace them with just egg whites; bacon is a processed meat with too much fat, try turkey bacon instead; instead of a sandwich at lunch, try soup or a salad; at dinner, a 12 ounce steak is too much red meat, your serving size should be 3 ounces, or you should replace it with something healthier like skinless chicken breast or fish; coconut oil has too much saturated fat, replace it with an unsaturated fat like canola oil; heavy cream is all fat, have some fat-free ice cream instead.”

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I googled “dietitian conference pictures” to try and find a gem with a bunch of fat and/or weak looking dietitians posing for a picture. What I found was weirder. From this n=3 sample size I can conclude that nearly all dietitians that pose for group pictures at conferences are women.

I don’t know if the entire industry is 99% women. Who knows, maybe it’s @BrickHead and a bunch if girls. Lol

It’d make sense if women who were trying to tell us men how to eat I reckon :slight_smile: i mean hell, a lot of us eat what mama gives us into adulthood, and often a wife is putting the dinners down. I’m all for a lady who wants to feed me, but we men have to be aware of that spoon traffic.

Yeah, about 95+% white female. I was the only male or one of two or three males in all classes and never worked with a male RD at a job.

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I don’t know if that is totally awesome or complete insanity?

What if they’re all together for too long and their cycles synchronize? One week you’re happy go lucky, next there are shoes flying in all directions. Then after that your a porterhouse in a room full of pit bulls.

There’s too much room in those pics for disaster.

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Wow. It’s like the exact opposite of pilots. Do they get low pay for people with a doctorate or are the hours really conducive to having kids?

My girlfriend is about to enter her Masters program in Clinical Nutrition. Then she plans to “certify” or “get liscensed”(?) as an R.D.

Do you have any advice about what she should be trying to get out of her education? Or how she can get the most out of these 2 school years? Or like, how to break into the field or who should she be reaching out to/trying to network with? I don’t even know enough about the Nutrition Game to really know what I’m trying to ask.

Stop!! You’re going to induce nightmares and destroy my sleep! :stuck_out_tongue:

I guess ideally it’d be awesome, but it’s like a case of dynamite…one spark and you’re screwed.

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Well, just because it’s on T Nation doesn’t mean it’s true but I take your point.

Having listened to some dieticians, who again match the description, dispense advice for gestational diabetes, I can tell you it was borderline frightening. Along the lines of ‘just eat whatever you want. The diabetes will go away after pregnancy.’ Also not to cut carbs, because ‘they’re essential’. Oh, brilliant.

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Yeh, some real geniuses out there.
I had one tell me not to eat steak at all…not just eat a certain amount, but cut it out altogether. Of course it wasn’t long after that when I refused to see her again. I know she meant well but damn! No steak, really? All because I’d told her I had eaten a 44oz steak one time on a bet (and two sides + 2 drinks). Immediately after I told her, she was all into the doctor talking about how “he’s eating huge slabs of red meat.” It was on a frickin dare, and a one time event. But whatever. If I could get a steak that tasty at 44 oz again, by George I’d eat another one right frickin now! (Place called “Airman’s Club” in Kenton, Ohio btw. The dude brings out a big old mountain of sirloin and starts tapping the knife a little wider and wider until ya tell him where to start slicing. I also recall spending a few hours laid across the bed in a hotel moaning about that shit, but damn it was good, and I won the bet!

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Haha, reminds me of Man v Food. Love that show and if I ever get to the US I’m sure to attempt my own version of such a challenge!

That’s funny! That also explains why 80%+ of the articles I’ve ever read on nutrition suggest fat free, low calorie, low everything BS. None of those women look like they lift weights, which would explain why they don’t know how an athlete should eat.

I read an article about Russell Wilson’s new diet, and apparently this “top-notch” dietitian of sorts is putting him on a dairy-free, gluten-free diet. He’s not allergic to gluten or lactose. That was also just funny to me because this whole “milk is bad, gluten is the devil” trend has actually made it’s way to diet coaches being paid gobs of money to fine tune the engines that are NFL quarterbacks. Very amusing.

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My wife had us on the gluten free thing to get my weight down years back. Although she made some very tasty stuff, it had no effect on me, and she didn’t have any fat to start with. Women are into fads I guess.

And no, the dietitians in that pic don’t look like they train with weights. Hell, if I had a male dietitian I’d want him to look the part,so how about some ripped ladies to hand out diet advice? If nothing else it’d make a visit to their offices more appealing :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, I’m a dietitian and I’ve had a bacon-egg-cheese-bagel sandwich (3 eggs, 3 slices bacon, American cheese) or cheese omelette and whatever starch I want for breakfast since my contest last fall. :grinning:

I’ll try to chime in on the other inquiries tomorrow.

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I see what you’re saying but I don’t think an RD needs to be ripped in all cases except if someone seriously wanted to or needed to be ripped.

I didn’t use an RD for my prep despite being one myself. :grinning:

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I was just saying I’d trust a person more if they look the part.
Hope nothing I said was out of line, and if so I apologize right frickin now.

Besides, a hot lady RD HAS to be a good thing no matter how ya look at it.

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You didn’t say anything wrong at all. I agree with much of what is said here.

To be fair, much of the “research” related to dietary recommendations is written in such a way that fat-free, low-everything is the “healthiest” diet. Explaining precisely what that is, and why it’s problematic, would take a few thousand words, but I’ll just give one example.

In research, very broadly, we have the “basic science” community (think people looking at cells under microscopes) and the “clinical outcomes” community (research done with human subjects, such as giving 10,000 people diet questionnaires, following them for 5 years to see how many people are hospitalized for heart disease, then analyzing which foods seem to be associated with the best/worst outcomes).

Here’s an example of how the “basic science” community can go astray. We want to study whether dietary fat is associated with cardiovascular risk. We decide that our surrogate measure of cardiovascular risk is going to be cholesterol. We feed six mice a “high fat” diet and six mice a “low fat” diet. At the end of our experiment, the mice fed a “high fat” diet are fatter and have higher cholesterol than the mice fed a “low fat” diet. Our conclusion is that a high-fat diet leads to obesity and high cholesterol.

But hold up for a second. What exactly does it mean to feed mice a “high fat” diet or a “low fat” diet? We’re not cooking up eggs in coconut oil for the high-fat guys and whole-grain oatmeal for the low-fat guys. It’s usually just “mouse chow” versus “mouse chow with canola oil” added, or something like that. Is that translatable to humans eating a dozen different sources of dietary fat? What does that mean about avocado, pork lard, grass-fed butter, or coconut oil? Probably very little; but because this is the long-held research dogma, the conclusion is invariably “fat → high cholesterol and obesity” - there’s no room for nuance. The study gets published in a journal, written up in the news, and RD’s (and doctors, for that matter) have their belief reinforced after reading that “A study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition confirmed that a high-fat diet leads to higher levels of cholesterol and obesity.”

So the problem is not just “skinny women and their stupid beliefs that low-fat everything is the way to go.” They’re often just repeating what “the research” has shown; my personal opinion is that the research is flawed.

Brick will have even more direct thoughts on the subject from the RD world; I’m merely giving the epidemiologist / researcher’s point of view.

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So basically you’re saying a bunch of skinny women RD’s are morons! Naw, kidding :stuck_out_tongue:

That was very interesting and informative-thanks :slight_smile:

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