High-Fat Fast-Food Breakfast Produces Rush of Inflammatory Factors into Blood Stream,
 

This is the title of a study as posted by
http://healthorbit.ca/NewsDetail.as...nltid=151120404

"High-Fat Fast-Food Breakfast Produces Rush of Inflammatory Factors into Blood Stream, UB Study Finds"

- I have reprinted it below if the link doesn't work.

- - -But look: their bad high-fat fast-food breakfast is: muffin and hashbrown - isn't that a high carb at least as well as - if not more than - high fat????

- - - It is really a pitty that they contrast this with a fruit and fiber breakfast.

Here is the rest, without comments from me in original form:

Repeated bouts may leave blood vessels in chronic state of inflammation


Friday, April 16, 2004 | BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A breakfast of Egg McMuffin and hash browns may taste good, but its high-fat, high-carbohydrate content wreaks havoc in the body's blood vessels, University at Buffalo endocrinologists have found.

"Eating that 900-calorie, high-fat meal temporarily floods the blood stream with inflammatory components, overwhelming the body's natural inflammation-fighting mechanisms," said Ahmad Aljada, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and first author on the study.

Results of the research appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Levels of inflammatory factors remained high for three-to-four hours after the high-fat meal, research showed.

"People who experience repeated short-lived bouts of inflammation resulting from many such unhealthy meals can end up with blood vessels in a chronic state of inflammation, a primary factor in the development of atherosclerosis," Aljada said.

"However, we've also shown in a study accepted, but not yet published, that a breakfast containing the same number of calories but derived mostly from fruit and fiber doesn't promote the inflammatory effect."

The research was carried out at the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of WNY located in Millard Fillmore Hospital of Kaleida Health. Center researchers hypothesize that the influx of macronutrients (calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates and water) may alter cell behavior and activate genes to produce more powerful enzymes and mediators that potentially are more damaging to the lining of blood vessels.

"The magnitude of this acute and transient effect is dependent on the type of macronutrient and may lead eventually to a chronic pro-inflammatory and pro-oxidative state, as seen in obesity," said Aljada. "This, in turn, leads to several medical complications."

The study was conducted with nine normal-weight subjects who ate a 900-calorie breakfast -- an Egg McMuffin and hash browns -- after an overnight fast. Another eight normal-weight subjects drank 300 milliliters of water as a control group. Blood samples were taken before eating or drinking and at 1, 2 and 3 hours afterward. The samples were analyzed to determine the concentration of inflammatory mediators and oxygen free radicals.

The study focused on a pro-inflammatory factor called nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-?B), which regulates the production of several inflammatory mediators and free radicals. "This pathway was activated in all subjects following food intake and resulted in the production of several inflammatory mediators regulated by it," Aljada said.

Results also showed a mean increase of free radicals over baseline of 129 percent, 175 percent and 138 percent at the three sampling times, respectively.

The study findings provide strong support for adopting a healthy diet low in fat and high in fruits and fiber to help protect against heart disease, Aljada said.

Additional researchers on the study, all from the UB Department of Medicine, were Priya Mohanty, M.D.; Husam Ghanim, a graduate student; Toufic Abdo, M.D., Devjit Tripathy, M.D., Ajay Chaudhuri, M.D., and Paresh Dandona, M.D., center director and senior author.

The research was supported by a grant from the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.

Contact: Lois Baker, ljbaker~buffalo.edu
Phone: 716-645-5000 ext 1417
Fax: 716-645-3765

I can't find the actual article they refer to, but on the surface this sounds like a badly set-up experiment. For starters, sample sizes of 8 and 9 are extremely low. There is no repetition. The two variables ("water" and "high fat-high carb") are confounding.


Any first-year graduate science student learns how to set up a priori a basic Analysis of Variance test that would separate the variables and detect the fat-carb interaction in the results. If this is really all they did I wonder how on earth they got funding from the William G. McGowan Fund for it.

They are muddling the picture by choosing a McDonald's breakfast. They should have called it a breakfast composed of highly processed food. A truer test would have been a breakfast of high-fat whole food. How do they know it's not all the processed crap in a McDonald's meal that is causing the problem. Seems a little premature to blame it on fat. And what about the carbs, no mention are made of them, as if they were totally neutral.

You're right Angeline, they could just as easily conclude that McDonald's causes inflammation.

Although that might be true, it will take a better study to show it.

Not sure where the 900 calories come from. An Egg McMuffin is 290 cals and hash browns are 130 cals for a total of 20g fat, 41g carbs, and 18g protein.

Remarkably, they simply conclude that this provides "...strong support for adopting a healthy diet low in fat and high in fruits and fiber to help protect against heart disease." It's doubtful that even a sixth-grade science fair project could get away with that leap.

I'm seeing more and more studies that its carbs that are causing inflammation, not the fats. What they should do is serve a muffin and low fat hash browns and see if they get the same result without the fat.

What they don't tell you is all that fat that they are blaming the inflamatory response on is mostly trans fat. I'll take my high fat, high protein chorizo and eggs made with butter any day.

This doesn't surprise me at all! The eggs are cooked in an artificial fat that is loaded in trans-fats.....and the hash browns are fried in hydrogenated oils, also high in trans-fats. Add in the high amount of carbs and what the heck did they expect?

I agree that this is a poor study, but even so I'm not surprised at the results.....it's their conclusion I have a problem with. I'd like to see the same study done with the same meal compared to eating a "healthy" breakfast of juice, cereal and milk AND a very healthy diet of eggs, cheese, veggies (like a nice veggie omlette). I'd bet the LC breakfast would give the best results.

Hashbrowns Potatoes, a blend of partially hydrogenated beef tallow and cottonseed oil, corn starch, salt, corn flour, dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (added to preserve natural colour), spices and cooked in A/V shortening (beef fat and cottonseed oil, monoglyceride citrate, propyl gallate, propylene glycol).

Egg McMuffin
Canadian Bacon Pork, water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphate, dextrose, carrageenan, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, smoke.
Processed Cheese Cheese (modified milk ingredients, bacterial culture, salt, microbial enzyme, calcium chloride and may contain colour and/or lipase), water, butter or whey butter, sodium phosphate and/or sodium citrate, salt, sorbic acid, natural colour (beta-carotene) and may contain citric acid, carboxymethyl cellulose, starch and/or soy lecithin, sodium bicarbonate.
Egg Canada Grade A Large. Cooked on a grill lightly seasoned with cooking spray (Partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lecithin, artificial flavour, beta carotene, TBHQ, citric acid).
English Muffin Enriched wheat flour, water, yeast, corn flour, glucose-fructose, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (canola and/or soybean and/or cottonseed), cornmeal, salt, wheat gluten, calcium propionate, calcium sulphate, monocalcium phosphate and may contain the following in various proportions: white vinegar, baking powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate), potassium sorbate, soy mono and digylcerides, ammonium chloride, ammonium phosphate, calcium peroxide, sodium-stearoyl-2-lactylate, sorbic acid, fumaric acid, calcium carbonate, protease enzymes.
Margarine Liquid and hydrogenated canola and cottonseed oil, water, salt, whey powder, sorbitan tristearate, soy lecithin, soy mono and diglycerides, sodium benzoate, potassium carbonate, artificial butter flavour, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3, coloured with beta-carotene.

Yeah and you are telling me that the inflammatory response is entirely due to fats.

Hash Browns have also been linked to Cancer in a swedish study, as Potatoes do produce some nasty side-products if fried too hot. It could be that what is causing the effects ?

They should have used a typical english breakfast instead. Would have made much more sense.

What is a typical english breakfast?

Here in the states, I'd say a "typical" american breakfast is cereal and milk and juice.

I don't know if I've ever, in my life, had cereal, milk and juice for breakfast. I've seen it on tv, but most folks I know here in the US eat either something really sugary (frosted honey bun) or something similar to the McD's meal.

I would say it is fried eggs, fried bacon, mushrooms, hot soggy tomatoes, a dollopp of baked beans and chips (thick french fries drowned in vinegar), sausages and toast/fried bread. Some people also eat black pudding with it, but I think that's scottish. Most cafes now sell it as all-day-breakfast. It's great (I just leave the chips and toast) and quite cheap.

When I did eat breakfast, most of the time it was cereal with whole milk and a cup of juice.

The portion of cereal however was always large (because a "normal" serving left me so hungry shortly after), and the cereal was always refined flour and sometimes sugary, and I put like a tablespoon of sugar in it... and lets not forget the banana added...

It's ironic because I hear so much of the person who ate donuts and mcdonalds as a breakfast, but I rarely did that. Sometimes I did, but not always. Usually when I did, it was because it was a treat or something (i.e. day after a holiday, or some other special occasion). Relative to my size, I ate mostly "healthful" foods... lots of fruits, sandwiches (made mostly of bread) juices and stuff like that. I could drink my fill in juice, I was so addicted to it when I came to atkins. Sure I had my share of soda and candy and sometimes I ate incredible portion sizes (but not always... for every day I ate 4000 calories there was anther where I had 1000), but I didn't do this to the point where I could have been 280. I think my eating habits alone probably contributed to 50% of my weight problem (meaning if i didn't have a problem with carbs, I probably would have weighed at most about 220)... the rest was all because its was carbs that made up those extra calories.
My problem was I was very insulin resistant. The "typical" breakfast foods - like the sugar, banana, juice, and cereal (over 80 carbs right there) - these are like poison for me. They store up as fat really easily and also make me want to eat more.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 79, No. 4, 682-690, April 2004
Title: Increase in intranuclear nuclear factor {kappa}B and decrease in inhibitor {kappa}B in mononuclear cells after a mixed meal: evidence for a proinflammatory effect

You probably need to be in a University or pay for it to access it. The point of the paper was different than what the press release etc. stressed. The authors talk about a 900 k meal, they don't stress the fat or the carbs.

I also should point out that they were trying to mimick a typical American breakfast by the authors point, they actually consumed a drink with defined carb and fat that the authors considered a mixed nutrient breakfast. The paper is actually better than all the press comments on it - while you are right that n of 9 is low, they measure each subject before, at 1 hr, at 2 hr etc.. so they measured changes what happened within each subject over time.

"the subjects were asked to eat a mixed meal containing 910 kcal (egg-muffin and sausage-muffin sandwiches and 2 hash browns, which contained 81 g carbohydrate, 51 g fat, and 32 g protein) over 15 min. "