Do you remember back in the 90s when everyone was wearing poofy pants and bright colors they used to talk about eating grapefruit for breakfast like sometimes they would even take a grapefruit sprinkle a little bit of sugar on it put it under a broiler it tastes amazing but I don’t necessarily think that’s how you want to eat your breakfast but there’s some pretty compelling evidence to add grapefruit to your breakfast and even myself as someone that isn’t a huge proponent of massive carbohydrate consumption I still
think that having some grapefruit along with carbohydrates in the morning could be a smart move let’s break it down after this article check out Thrive Market they’re an online membership-based grocery store so whether you are doing paleo whether you’re eating a bunch of carbs whether you’re training for a triathlon whatever they’ve got something for you okay so you go to thrive Market you sort by different diet type you can find different recipes it’s awesome and then you can you can even find recipes
and have every single ingredient in the recipe be added to a shopping cart it’s super cool very intuitively set up for grocery shopping and then it gets delivered to your doorstep in a couple of days it makes it easy peasy so that link is down below and the best part because they are a sponsor and they are today’s article sponsor that link is going to save you 25 off your first order through Thrive and also get you a free gift along with that so definitely want to check them out after this article that link is down below that’s a special
sponsor link and a thank you to thrive Market first and foremost grapefruits are already a low glucose fruit okay when you’re looking at fruits you always want to find fruits that are higher in fructose and lower in glucose because fructose does not Spike our insulin it does not affect the pancreatic beta cells there’s only like six-ish grams of glucose six and a half grams of glucose or so in like a large grapefruit and I usually wouldn’t recommend eating a whole one I’d recommend just eating half
of it okay now what it comes down to is an active component called neringen but we’re going to get to that in a second let’s first talk about sort of this observational study before we get into the mechanisms so this first study was what’s called an observational study and it was published in the Journal of medicinal food okay took a look at 91 obese people and it broke them into four different categories okay so along with a meal or before a meal they gave them either half of an actual grapefruit
along with a placebo capsule a capsule that did nothing okay or they gave them apple juice plus a placebo a pill that did nothing or they gave them grapefruit juice plus a pill that did nothing or they gave them apple juice plus a grapefruit pill okay so pretty interesting categories well the group that ate the actual grapefruit itself had the greatest amount of weight loss but every single group that had grapefruit in it whether a grapefruit capsule or grapefruit juice or whatever well they all saw a reduction in insulin
two hours after the meal okay this is pretty important because when it comes down to Fat Loss we do need to have insulin drop and glucagon increase okay as long as insulin is spiked and is high it’s very difficult to tap into our stored fat or stored storage in general just like glucose as well we want to have insulin come down and glucagon come up because glucagon is going to Signal ampk it’s going to Signal all kinds of stuff so speaking of ampk let’s talk about the mechanisms here because this
is where it gets really interesting so there’s a study published in The Archives of biochemistry and biophysics okay and it took a look at this active component that seems to be what is triggering this reduction in insulin okay and it’s called naringen or neurogen whatever you want to call it okay so this neringian seems to have antioxidant properties and anti-inflammatory properties kind of boring because a lot of times when we look at different fruits and vegetables we say oh they’re antioxidant
rich like that doesn’t mean diddly squat okay seriously generally speaking I am not a fan of loading up with a bunch of antioxidants because I think it’s best for the body to up regulate its own antioxidant processes quick digression to make some sense like cold plunges heat shock treatments like where you’re going into a hot sauna that triggers your body to produce its own antioxidants like superoxide dismutase and things like that that is a good mechanism because you’re training your body if you’re constantly bombarding
your body with a ton of antioxidants you can kind of enable your body and then it ends up making it so it’s not as good so not saying don’t eat fruits and veggies eat them for sure but don’t lean on that right but in this given case this naringen is affecting these Pathways which seems to be the pathway in which insulin resistance is improved or insulin sensitivity increases it’s sort of ameliorating this through that pathway so in this given case it’s kind of unique this naringen seems to be very
powerful there’s not a whole lot of other mechanisms with grapefruit as we could see this happening like there are fiber in grapefruit but not enough fiber to really put this much of an insulin kind of buffering effect in the other thing to notice is with this naringen is it was up regulating something called ampk which is essentially making it so that the glucose that is in the bloodstream gets sucked up into the cell a lot faster so having grapefruit alone by itself would be great because it could potentially put you into a deficit
very fast very low calorie fruit that’s putting you into a deficit however I have a big problem with doing that for breakfast okay if you’re going to have solo grapefruit it might not be bad to have solo grapefruit at night okay don’t replace your breakfast with grapefruit if anything replace your dessert with grapefruit because then you could potentially bring down glucose from the meal prior okay so if you’re going solo grapefruit have it for dessert and just put a little bit of I don’t know Stevia
on it or whatever and put it under a broiler it tastes pretty good but if you’re going to have it in the morning have it with your higher calorie higher carbohydrate meal okay because then it can affect how your body utilizes that glucose better by driving up ampk okay so let’s say you’re having some I don’t know gluten-free waffles and some eggs well then it would be kind of simple to just add a half of a grapefruit in and just like I mentioned in that initial study it was affecting the insulin
response two hours later so potentially allowing you to get into that fat burning State quicker in the day okay we should be consolidating the majority of our calories to the morning anyway so I don’t want you to just say I’m going to have a light breakfast and have this grapefruit I think that’s the downfall of us as a society in terms of our waistlines right or the increase I should say so that whole process of just having a light breakfast makes you up making poor decisions later on so don’t
replace your breakfast with grapefruit the grapefruit should be additive to your already significantly more calorically dense breakfast higher calorie breakfast moderate calorie lunch lower calorie dinner then have the grapefruit with the breakfast and have a grapefruit for dessert if you want to do that I’ll see you tomorrow