By Erin Kennedy
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.”*
We’ve all heard the saying that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, but even if you didn’t know that was an ad slogan crafted by a breakfast cereal company, it sounds like a dubious claim. There has long been a debate in western nutrition over the value of breakfast (check out this Atlantic article for a fun history).
What about Chinese dietary theory? I try not to let my personal opinion (or my appetite) cloud the medical theory informing my clinical practice, but here, they are pretty well aligned. I am a firm proponent of breakfast. I love breakfast. And so does Chinese dietetic theory.
Having recently convinced my third patient of the month that it may be worth the effort to shift their morning routines to break-fast in the morning with a nourishing meal, and not just a coffee, I thought this topic deserved a blog post.
Where TCM Theory and Blood Sugar & Hormone Management Meet
Here I’ll give some deeper explanation about the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theory behind this advice. I’ll also describe how beautifully that relates to western nutrition concepts of blood sugar management and your endocrine (hormone) system. This advice is particularly relevant for many of the patients I see who want to improve fertility, manage reproductive system conditions like PCOS, or who chronically suffer from digestive issues, headaches, fatigue, anxiety or depression. If this is you, and you routinely skip or skimp on breakfast, please stick with me- this is complicated, but really important!
First: The TCM Meridian Clock. Timing is Everything
Chronobiology is very important in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). TCM theory describes a clock of energy flow through the 12 major organ systems (which, because they don’t always equate to the organ as defined by bio-medicine, I will capitalize as I write). Each organ system’s energy is known to peak within a 2 hour window, in sequence. The Lung is the first in the cycle, at 3-5am. From 5-7am, the Large Intestine peaks. From 7-9am, the Stomach energy peaks, followed by the Spleen from 9am-11am, the Heart from 11am-1pm, the Small Intestine from 1pm-3pm and so on.
The Stomach is the receptacle for food that does the first digestive process of “rotting and ripening”. Its capacity for this is strongest from 7am to 9am, so it just makes sense to use the Stomach’s power in this window for your first meal. (And ideally, if all is running smoothly, you will have already had your morning bowel movement around the Large Intestine’s peak window, without needing a coffee. If not, this may be the first thing we need to work on before you’ll really feel hungry for a morning meal).
The Spleen, in TCM, could more appropriately be described as the Spleno-pancreatic system, but that’s a mouthful. It’s responsible for the “transformation and transportation” of qi. While “qi” doesn’t have a great translation into a single concept in English, here, we can think of it partly as energy (in the form of glucose) and nutrients extracted from the food we eat. I also think of it as the digestive hormones that communicate to other body systems based on the food we’ve eaten. The Spleen’s power peaks just after the Stomach, 9-11am.
These organ systems are working all the time, but it’s important that the four main digestive organs are packed into the first half of daylight hours. The digestive process is often compared to a cooking pot, and to “cook” the food inside our bodies, we need fire! The yang aspect of our body, which is strongest during the daylight hours, is critical to this digestive fire. Eating too late in the evening is often seen to be the cause of digestive discomfort and “food stagnation”, and can cause yang or heat to flare up out of sync with our body’s internal clock, keeping us awake when our body’s should be cooling down and shifting into a yin mode of rest.
Second: Your Gut and Your Hormones. Perfect Together
From a western nutrition perspective, keeping your blood sugar relatively stable throughout the day can dramatically improve the function of your endocrine system and by extension, your energy, your ability to manage stress, and your reproductive health. Eating on a routine that aligns with your circadian rhythm can regulate hormone production and improve fertility.
The endocrine system is responsible for moving glucose (sugar) from your blood to your brain, and muscles (including your heart). The hormones insulin and glucagon manage the balance of blood sugar in response to everything you eat (or don’t). If your diet is challenging your endocrine system to keep up with major fluctuations, or sustained periods of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) from fasting, this instability will be seen as a stressor. It leads to further imbalances in other parts of the endocrine system, triggering your adrenal glands to produce the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
This is partly why intermittent fasting (or skipping breakfast) can improve your perceived energy levels; keeping your body in a hypoglycemic state (starvation mode) kicks up the hormones that are supposed to give you an energy boost to get to your next meal. And adrenaline does move glucose out of storage to circulate it into the blood, to keep your brain and muscles going.
But if you haven’t truly fueled your body, it’s drawing on reserves that are not being adequately restocked, which can, over time, cause symptoms of adrenal fatigue. In TCM theory, we recognize that if you neglect or tax your Spleen qi through poor nutrition or irregular eating schedules, your body will draw on Kidney qi, and eventually your jing or essence, which is not easily restored once it’s depleted. Healthy jing is crucial for reproductive health.
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