Breakfast swaps, protecting yourself from toxic scents, plus the importance of glymph and lymph for health

🥑 Good food: Your healthy breakfast algorithm

The saying that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” might be true, but probably not for the reasons you think…

Breakfast is important insofar as it can either set us up for a happy, healthy, productive day… or can tank our energy and put us on an inflammatory, glucose rollercoaster. The standard American breakfast does the latter, and we would all do better if we threw away our normal conception of breakfast and instead focused on getting as many health-promoting nutrients in as possible. The American breakfast classics include the “Unholy Trinity” of metabolic health busters: refined grains (waffles, pancakes, muffins, cereal, granola, bagels, toast), refined and liquid sugars (maple syrup, juice, pastries…), seed oils (potatoes and eggs fried in cheap industrial oils). Let’s change it up in 2024…

An ideal breakfast will include the 5 key components of metabolically healthy meals: Omega-3 fats, lots of fiber, at least 30 grams of healthy protein, a probiotic source, and a ton of micronutrient + antioxidant rich ingredients. And, it ideally won’t spike blood sugar! (Blood sugar spike = more cravings, post-meal energy crash, and fat storage 👎️ 👎️ 👎️ ).

To achieve this, I like to mix and match a few things from the following list to create a healthy breakfast for any preference:

• 🍳 An egg dish: I love pasture raised egg frittatas (either vegetarian or with meat, like ground bison) or egg scrambles with lots of sauteed vegetables - see here for my frittata recipe. Skip quiches which have a refined-grain crust, and instead stick with frittatas.

• 🥗 A veggie side: On the side of the egg dish, fill half the plate with big salad with avocado, lots of vegetables, and a homemade dijon vinaigrette (for a simple healthy dijon vinaigrette, simply combine ⅓ any vinegar, ⅓ olive oil, and ⅓ dijon mustard in a jar and shake it up). Or, serve eggs with a side of roasted vegetables like carrots, broccoli, or delicata squash. 

• 🫐 A “sweet-ish” component: I love doing either a big chia pudding (or better yet, basil seed pudding) with berries and almond butter, or an unsweetened dairy and non-dairy yogurt with berries. Top either with edible flowers for more fun. A very well balanced green smoothie works here, too: I follow Kelly Leveque’s strategy of a Fab 4 smoothie: protein, fat, fiber, and greens.

• 🍞 “Bread:” Grain free almond/coconut flour pancakes with a drizzle of almond butter and chopped fruit or homemade no-sugar fruit compote on top - see my recipe here. Or these cauliflower rice cheesy muffins. Or, for some crunch, flax crackers like Flackers or Ella’s Flats. If you must do toast, use a gluten-free, grain free version like Base Culture.

• ☕ Drinks: Organic coffee with A2 grass-fed milk (I love Alexandre farms milk). When I’m serving breakfast to a group, I serve sparkling water (I love Spindrift!) in wine glasses with a splash of kombucha and a wedge of fruit or berries dropped in!

• 🥫 Condiments: Organic hot sauces, like Arizona Pepper or Yellow Bird.

You can find some of my healthy brunch recipes (including these almond flour pancakes and frittata) on my website, here.

🙅‍♀️ Avoid these foods when preparing your breakfasts to make them so much more metabolically healthy:

• 🥔 Fried potatoes of any kind, i.e., hash-browns, home-fries. (While not a refined grain or sugar, these are a starchy carb that will raise many peoples’ glucose levels)

• 🍞 Bread, bagels, tortillas (Refined grains)

• 🥣 Instant oatmeal (🙅‍♀️ Refined carbs, spikes glucose)

• 🍁 Maple syrup (🙅‍♀️ Liquid sugar)

• 🥛 Sweetened yogurt (🙅‍♀️ Added refined sugar - note: many times, “Plain” yogurt will have lots of added sugar. Make sure it says “unsweetened”)

• 🧃 Juice (🙅‍♀️ A no-fiber liquid fruit sugar. Juice will likely cause an insulin spike that increasing the fat-storage potential of your meal, and lead to cravings throughout the day.)

• 🍫 Granola (🙅‍♀️ Has added sugar and dried fruit, both of which will spike blood sugar. If you’re going to do granola, make a grain-free sugar-free version at home like this one by my friend Beth from Nest Wellness.)

• 🍩 Donuts, pastries, pancakes, waffles (🙅‍♀️ Refined flour and added sugar)

Get more tips and ideas on how to make your next tasty and super healthy breakfast or brunch on the Levels blog, here.

These are all some examples of metabolically healthy meals that include many of the 5 key components I mentioned earlier:

🔄 Good swap: “Air fresheners” are poison ☠️ 

If you follow me on social media, you know that “air fresheners'' and artificially scented home products make me irate, because they are emitting health-harming substances in a way that is really hard to get away from… because it’s in the air. 🤮 

Scented plug-ins, automated scent dispensers in public bathrooms, little dangling scented trees in cars… artificial fragrances come in all shapes and sizes, and they seem to be everywhere these days: in Airbnbs, Ubers, office buildings, retail stores, airports, even gyms. I can barely walk down the street without smelling scented air from someone’s laundry vent. 

Despite the ubiquity of these products, it doesn’t change the truth: air-fresheners and artificial fragrances are contributing to chronic metabolic diseases, respiratory issues, and cancer. This is clear in the research literature. Fragrance companies have a weird loophole where they don’t have to disclose all their ingredients because they are “trade secrets”, but many ingredients tested have been found to be extremely detrimental to health.

Why you should avoid air fresheners and artificial scents ❌

Exposure to fragranced consumer products like air fresheners, cleaning supplies, and personal care items is associated with a range of adverse health effects including migraine headaches, asthma attacks, neurological problems, respiratory difficulties, skin irritation, and cognitive problems, amongst others.

A study surveying over 1,000 individuals found that over one third of participants experienced health problems – like migraine headaches or respiratory problems – when exposed to fragranced products. Over half of those individuals reporting potentially disabling effects. This is because many scented products contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs), many of which are toxic or break down into substances that are toxic, like formaldehyde or acetaldehyde. 🤢 Some VOCs are “known carcinogens,” and many are “suspected carcinogens,” which means they directly cause or likely contribute to cancer. 

In one study, more than 156 VOCs were found to be emitted from 37 fragranced consumer products, and of these, “42 VOCs were classified as toxic or hazardous under US federal laws, and each product emitted at least one of these chemicals.”  The paper goes on to note that “carcinogenic hazardous air pollutants from so-called green or organic fragranced products were not significantly different from regular fragranced products.” Despite this, “fewer than 3% were disclosed on the product labels…or websites.”

The EPA notes that indoor air pollution can be 2-5 times greater than outdoors for many chemicals, and one of the causes of this is household products. Stop the madness!

So, what’s the alternative? 🔄

Shift your life towards unscented products of all kinds – unscented hand soaps, body soap, shampoo, conditioner, face wash, hair spray, deodorant, laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, candles… everything!

If you must have scents, I recommend scented candles or room scents made from 100% essential oils, ideally 100% organic essential oils. Some of my favorite scented candles are from Big Dipper Wax Works and Flamingo Estates. Other great options for 100% essential oil fragrances are Slow North and Sea Witch Botanicals. VERIFY that your products are actually made with 100% essential oils; the word “fragrance” or “parfume” means do not use it.

You can even DIY your own 100% essential oil air freshener at home! Here is a quick and easy tutorial from The Homemade Experiment on how to make your own air freshener diffuser with just a handful of rice and your preferred essential oil:

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup rice

• 15-20 drops essential oil of your choice

Instructions

1. Add 1/2 cup rice to a small container. Jasmine rice works well.

2. Add 15-20 drops of your preferred essential oil(s). Good options are pine, peppermint, lavender, and lemon.

3. Stir or shake to distribute the oil through the rice.

4. Place the container somewhere you want to naturally scent the air.

Diffusers that you can fill with 100% essential oils are also a good option. 

Some of my favorite unscented products or use 100% essential oils include the following:

• ECOS Laundry Detergent Packs - Free & Clear, Plastic Free

• ECOS Plant Powered Dishwashing Detergent Packs - Free & Clear, Plastic Free

• Dr. Bronner’s Unscented Castile soap for hand soap and dish soap

• Vinegar and water with essential oils as an all-purpose cleaning solution in a glass bottle

• Osmia organics unscented or essential oil scented lotions, body oils, face wash, body soaps. My favorite skincare brand.

Shoutout to one of our early subscribers, Amanda, for suggesting this topic for the newsletter!

🧠 Good thought - Facilitating flow on earth and in the body 🌊 

I watched a breathtaking documentary this weekend about the Kogi people called “Aluna - An Ecological Warning by the Kogi People” that has a LOT we can learn about environmental and physical health, and specifically how disturbing natural fluid flows - on earth or in the body - lead to dysfunction of the whole system.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the movie was about how the Kogi people experience natural waterways as the literal veins of the Earth, viewing rivers, streams, lakes, etc as vital, fully connected channels that sustain the life of the entire global ecosystem.

In this worldview, rivers and water systems are analogous to the circulatory system in a human. In our modern world, due to infrastructure projects and development, we frequently interrupt, drain, block (i.e. dam), or reroute the natural flow of water sources, rarely taking into account how these modifications might affect the greater ecosystem (i.e., the migratory patterns of fish, or rain patterns) in profound ways.

In the documentary on the Kogi, they show that when a coastal lagoon was drained to make space for a power plant and expanded ports, the Kogi knew that this would lead to the drying up of lakes high up in the mountains hundreds of miles away. This would then have a ripple-down effect on life all over the mountain, as well as lead to landslides and floods... To them, this result (which came to fruition) was obvious... if you damage the outflow of water from the river into the ocean by draining the coastal lagoons, you invariably impact everything upstream of it via the impact on rain patterns, via how salt is deposited in the earth at the altered water outflow to the ocean… and this in turn affects the ecosystem of birds, fish, trees, insect life, which then impacts how seeds are transferred and plants pollinated and so much more… It’s all connected. You can’t interrupt one part of a system and not expect it to affect all the other parts it is connected with.

What struck me is how a similar phenomena happens in the human body, where our modern living and choices are affecting many of the fluid flow and drainage pathways of the body in ways that wreak havoc and predispose to disease all throughout the body.

Lymphatics and Glymphatics: Proper fluid flow prevents disease

Take the lymphatic and glymphatic systems, for instance. The lymphatic system is a network of vessels and nodes that transport lymph fluid throughout the body for clearance, while the glymphatic system is a recently discovered brain waste clearance system that removes toxins and waste products during sleep.

Impaired lymphatic flow - of which a major cause is sitting too much (moving our muscles helps squeeze lymph fluid back towards the heart) -  is implicated in conditions like lymphedema, cancer, infections, and inflammatory diseases. Additionally, compromised glymphatic function in the brain -  strongly linked to insufficient sleep, as the glymphatic system is active when we sleep -  has been correlated with neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson’s, and mood disorders like depression and anxiety. Simply put: when normal fluid flow is interrupted in the body, crap builds up, and disease can emerge in the whole body. 

What can we learn from Kogi people? So, SO much. (This newsletter won’t scratch the surface). Complex systems like the earth and the body are interdependent webs, where impacting one part has ripple effects on the whole system. In our reductionist modern Western framework (which is clearly reflected in our 40+ medical subspecialties that see the body as distinct, unrelated parts, to our detriment), we have forgotten that the body is one interconnected system.

Additionally, we’d be wise to think about how we can shape our daily choice to create less impediment to the natural flow of fluids in the body… A few simple ways to do this:

• Lifting weights and doing resistance training regularly to squeeze muscles and activate lymph flow

• Walking frequently throughout the day, again to activate lymph flow and promote nitric oxide production (which dilates blood vessels)

• Elevating legs above heart for 15-30 minutes or doing yoga inversions… aka using gravity to support lymph drainage

• Staying super hydrated… this has a profound effect on fluid dynamics in the body!

• Getting optimal quality and quantity of sleep to activate glymphatic system and clear the brain of metabolic toxins. Fight depression and neurodegeneration with SLEEP!

I highly recommend for everyone to watch the movie - it’s free on YouTube here. Learn more about the Kogi people, Aluna, and the movie here.

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This week: I’m filming a course on metabolic health at Commune this week (which is all about metabolic health! It’s called: Optimizing Metabolism for Boundless Energy). Sign up at www.onecommune.com/casey - it releases in mid-March!