Most people believe breakfast is the most important meal of the day. This newsletter will examine the Nutritional and Healing value of breakfast paying some attention to the consumption of cereals for breakfast and their disadvantages as well. Other therapeutic breakfast foods will be examined such as yogurt, or juicing. A general look at what can be eaten for breakfast and the health benefits of eating different foods will be examined. Hanna Kroeger Healer will also begin to examine the health implications of whether or not to eat breakfast as well.
The concept of digestive fire and how it relates to having strong digestion or weak digestion will be introduced. Once digestive fire is explained, there will be a discussion of cooling and warming foods, and some signs of weakened digestive fire. Spices as well as foods are often used to keep up the digestive fire, and will be examined in some detail.
The principle of Vibrational resonance will be explained and mentioned as it relates to what you eat in the morning, and how many times a week you eat a particular kind of breakfast.
Speaking of cereal, do you remember any of the Seinfeld episodes where Jerry Seinfeld had several different brands of cereal boxes in his kitchen, in the cupboards, atop the kitchen sink? I managed to watch one episode on DVD just a few weeks ago, and I counted over 12 different types of cereals? Amazing! In this episode I saw Kramer eating a multi-colored cereal with cold milk, and being caught in a Jerry “situation”. Of course that situation was not known to him and he put all the cereal and milk quickly in a drawer.
I think Jerry had the right idea to rotate his cereals in the morning. In other words he had a wide variety of choices for his breakfast cereal, so that he could always eat a different cereal each day of the week.
There could be a disadvantage to eating the same kind of cereal in the morning and even just eating cereal in the morning every day of the week though, even if they are all different brands. I’m speaking generally about eating cereal with cold milk. Of course you can eat cereal with almond milk, or soy milk, rice milk or even hemp seed milk too. The breakfast cereal Hanna Kroeger Healer is talking about here would be in a bowl of milk though. To be specific about it, cereals, mean your boxed supermarket purchased cereals, as well as quick cooked oats.
While it can be beneficial to eat warm or cold cereal in the morning several days of the week, again eating warm or cold cereal everyday may not be the wisest choice, nor what your body really needs in the morning. The breakfast cereal could or could not be vibrationally resonant with you. In fact you could be food sensitive to it.
Your body could be rejecting the cereal, but you may not know it until you did not eat any kind of cereal for some period of time. If your body is rejecting cereal or any morning breakfast, you may be burping gas after breakfast, tasting food again for several hours, feel dizzy, or disoriented, or just plain feel lethargic.
Have you looked carefully at some of the ingredients of commercially available cereals, and cereals popularized by commercials?
While I believe that all natural cereals can have a better chance of being vibrationally resonant with you and are therefore good for your lifestyle and the season and your nutritional needs, some of them contain many ingredients, many different kinds of grains. Careful attention to their digestibility is also warranted.
In commercial cereals, however, there are ingredients that even a 3rd grader could not pronounce. These odd, perhaps man-made ingredients in some commercial cereals, could cause some health difficulties and some people could be sensitive to them.
Preservatives, man modified ingredients, and even lots of dies, and certain flavorings exist in store purchased cereals as well. By flavorings, I mean there may be simulated flavors in the cereal you regularly eat! Natural cereals tend to have no preservatives for freshness, and tend to avoid corn-derived ingredients, which many people cannot digest properly. If you cannot digest it properly then the cereal is not vibrationally resonant with you. Even one ingredient can cause the whole to be negative. It will therefore disturb your energy, and your digestion.
If cereal is good for you however, you may be able to only eat it only a few days a week, and only on non-consecutive days for optimal Vibrational resonance. Most people build food sensitivities later in life. These food sensitivities can cause them to gain weight, and have a myriad of other seemingly unrelated symptoms. And sensitivities to breakfast cereals are probably very common. Hence, there is a great need to look at eating other things for breakfast. Sometimes people have gravitated away from cereals and milk because after several years they have knowingly become sensitive to them.
My own personal version of eating different brands of breakfast cereal would be to eat a different fruit spread with possibly some bread in the morning. Apricot, Morello Cherry, Black Currant, Raspberry, Wild Blackberry, and Wild Blueberry are some of the organic fruit spreads I often purchase and have in my cupboard.
I love what Apricot jam does for my immune system. In some quantities, consuming it can boost my immune system and help me ward off a cold and even a flu. It’s also specific to my blood type.
These “jams” I’ve mentioned are now called fruit spreads because they are sweetened with fruit juice, or natural sugar only, instead of refined sugar. I’d like to mention that even if a particular brand of some flavor of fruit spread or jam, for example, raspberry jam is vibrationally resonant with you then it may not be true a different brand may be resonant with you. There could be something adverse in the manufacturing process of a different brand that is not even easily evident. And they could taste exactly the same. Have you ever loved a food product, but then noticed that something changed about it, and it did not resonate with you any longer; you could not digest it well any longer? Something may have changed in the manufacturing process; perhaps you could no longer digest an additive.
In the morning as always, it is listening to your body that counts, in what fruit spread or other item you pick and with what you eat it.
Unfortunately I don’t have enough fruit spreads to say I have over 12 different flavors like Jerry Seinfeld, but perhaps if I shopped around a little more for other organic jams?
But seriously, I know what jams are good for my body, and I can feel what jams are good for my blood type, and improving the energies in my body, so I have found I tend to stick with these flavors, (and especially colors) because they are best for me. Having a variety of colors, and flavors cannot be understated. The deep red of raspberry, and the blue of blueberries offer very beneficial energies. The energetic healing effects of blueberries are very beneficial! So I am recommending that you look at eating different kinds of jams in the morning and find the right ones for you. If you are already eating a colorful jam on a regular basis and you absolutely love it, it could be you are eating it for its beneficial energies to one or more organs in your body!
There are only two brands of jam that I purchase here in Canada, and one contains brown sugar as a sweetener, and the other contains other natural sweeteners such as apple juice, grape juice, etc. One of these brands is also available in America.
The fruit spreads I purchase have a lot of fruit in them. I also don’t use mixed fruit jams (2 or more flavors in one) because I’ve found that I often don’t digest them well. And there are some single jams I’ve tried which I do not digest well at all either.
And I also do not just eat them in the morning, but sometimes I feel the need to eat some kind of fruit spread after a meal, usually several hours later, especially after a high-protein meal. Or sometimes just as a snack in the evening.
One of the top reasons we eat cereals in the morning may be because we think they are extremely healthy. Another reason is we are constantly bombarded with fun advertisements that tell us about the health benefits of cereal, and how much fun they are to eat in the morning. We see people eating breakfast cereals on TV commercials all the time. As children we may have watched all the fun commercials and gotten into the habit of eating cereal in the morning. They are very easy to prepare and of course they are fun to eat!
Some cereal commercials have gone so far as to even demonstrate people eating dry cereal without the milk in the evenings as a snack.
Also, breakfast cereals are light eating, and you may choose to eat them because you may want to avoid a big breakfast because you had a large meal the evening before. Another reason you might eat cereal in the morning is that you could have weakened digestion and not know it. So, physically or also psychologically we may think that eating a light cereal is preferable in the morning.
If you eat cereal in the morning, perhaps you have gotten used to the idea of eating cereals with cold milk because it saves you time, but you may not know the downside of eating cold milk in the morning. You have your hot coffee to wake your stomach and your brain up and then you have your cold cereal to boost your blood sugar, and get some calories. Would breakfast cereal really be a healthy meal even if you ate an organic multi-grain cereal? And are cereals really good for you on a long-term basis?
Breakfast cereals certainly can be nutritious. They could contain omega-3 fatty acids and lignans from organic flax seed, heart-healthy fiber from organic oat bran, and essential amino acids from high quality organic soy protein or phytonutrients and bioflavonoids from organic fruit. As mentioned you could pick other types of milk for breakfast with cereal, and this could make a huge difference in the digestibility and nutritional value. A lot of the newer cereals are becoming even more loaded with fiber.
There are other popular healthful things most people have eaten for breakfast at one time or another. They are
The truth is however, that we could eat anything for breakfast that we eat at other times of the day. We could have chicken for breakfast, or steak, or cooked veggies, fish, rice as long as the rules of food combining are well followed. Following the rules of food combining is highly recommended for morning meals. Following food combining gives your digestion a boost, and internally allows more energy for healing, especially keeping the liver healthy.
And so if the rules of food combining are followed you could increase your protein intake, and increase your energy during the day with just a little minor planning. Over a period of 3-6 months you could feel the benefits in several ways.
If your body is better off with some protein with veggies in the morning, even just a small amount, rather than eggs and sausages other times of the week, then it will be vibrationally resonant with you, and your gain in energy in the long-term could be great. It’s finding what your body really needs in the morning that is the most important thing. It could be as simple as two small yogurts, or a special juice blend twice a week.
How about beef barley soup, or some other kind of soup in the morning? And your optimal breakfast food could and perhaps should change with the seasons. In the summer it could be more fruit on different days, and some protein in some form in others. Or perhaps fruit first, and then later on a protein shake when you arrive at work. For example a smoothie with whey powder, rice milk, almond milk, or some other protein powder could be optimal for you. This matching of breakfast foods for your body and lifestyle is what Vibrational resonance is all about.
There is definitely some controversy surrounding whether to eat breakfast or not. And in particular whether eating breakfast would benefit weight loss on a calorie restricted diet. Hanna Kroeger Healer believes the way to solve this for a particular person is to just do a Vibrational Reading for it.
If you do not feel hungry in the morning, there could be several reasons for that. It could be a paradox, but your digestion might be weaker than you think. If you don’t feel like eating breakfast, that could also mean you had too much to eat during the previous night, and your digestion is recovering the morning after.
It could be you either have weak digestion or strong digestion. You could be teetering onto digestive weakness and not be fully aware of it. In fact some people most certainly will drink hot coffee in the morning to wake up their stomach, because they have weak underlying digestion. After a cup or two their appetite improves. Some people have to drink several cups of coffee throughout the morning to gain an appetite before lunch!
Whether you can advantageously skip breakfast may also depend on your activity level. If you do skip breakfast on a long-term basis you may stress your adrenals as well. If you don’t have the appetite for breakfast in general this could mean that your digestion is internally cold and weak.
Do you have fresh raw vegetable juice in the morning? Do you have a glass or two of grapefruit or orange juice for breakfast?
If you are going to drink juice in the morning, such as orange juice, or grapefruit juice, or some other pasteurized store purchased blend, then it is highly recommended that you juice it yourself fresh from the fruit. I have found that drinking pasteurized juices can confuse the human body, and can reduce its energy. The Vibrational resonance of whatever juice you drink in the morning means that it supports you energetically and nutritionally. If you consume something that does not have life energy in it, then it would rob energy from your own body, and it’s own processes.
If you create a special juice blend for breakfast on a regular basis using your own juicer, you may be able to do this several times a week, or only once a week in the Winter.
Vibrational resonance of a fresh juice blend here also means the frequency with which you ingest it matches up with what your body can handle, and again this could change with the seasons. Adding in some warming ginger, and some greens could make the juicing even more valuable. Add in ginger in the cold weather, and leave it out in the summer. Ginger juice can be a tough juice to get used to because it is so pungent on the tongue and back of the throat. However it is so valuable to your body, and digestion. Ginger is great to prevent colds and has many other benefits.
As in everything that you ingest, it should be vibrationally resonant for a certain period of time, and the frequency of consumption should be resonant with you, your lifestyle and your overall diet. The consumption frequency can mean once a week, twice a week, etc, or just on the weekends.
For an example of a special juice blend, perhaps you drink a special greens drink with fresh carrot or fruit juices added in the morning several days of the week. However, the reality is that it is best to do this for only 3 times a week in the summer and not more. In the Winter this fresh juice blend could be optimally consumed only one day a week.
Anything out of this vibrational resonance would create imbalances in your body and therefore not be Healing. As an example of Vibrational resonance going up perhaps in the first 3 weeks of the Fall, you could then consume this juice blend 5 times a week, thus greatly increasing your ability to detoxify. This is an example of the timing of the seasons changing the vibrational resonance.
The important point to make again here is that some food or drink you consume in the morning could not be vibrationally resonant with you, and therefore can insidiously reduce your health. In other words, reduce your health gradually and unbeknownst to you. For example, you could consume something that imbalances your liver’s ability to detoxify. A better breakfast is warranted that provides your liver, and stomach with a better start to the day. Green drinks are certainly not for everybody.
The Chinese often bring covered pots to the dinner table to keep food warm throughout the meal. They also often eat soups to warm the body and the digestion. The Vietnamese eat pho soup for breakfast – a beef noodle soup, which is also helpful for the kidneys.
In both Traditional Chinese Medicine, and also the ancient Ayurveda, there is exists the concept of “digestive fire”, and both talk about increasing the “digestive fire”. Rather than doing cleansing which can reduce the digestive fire, they often regularly perform therapeutic eating to increase the digestive fire.
The concept of “digestive fire” means the human digestive process is likened to putting food in a cauldron, or pot, much like putting a pot on the “fire” to cook food. The fire of the “digestive fire” comes from the digestive process – in other words the human body, but also is supported from the foods we eat. So, that there are foods which cool the body, and would diminish the digestive fire, and foods that support the digestive fire and warm the body.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) each food we eat is classified according to its internal temperature effect on the body, as cold, cooling, neutral (neither warming nor cooling), and warm, and hot. This internal temperature classification has nothing to do with whether a food is hot or cold to the touch. It’s an internal temperature effect on the body.
For example in the summer we often have watermelon to naturally cool the body off. Watermelon is cold and cools heat in your body. Oranges and bananas are also cooling. Eating these foods, and raw foods especially in the winter could diminish your digestive fire, and your ability to digest other foods later on in life, thus creating an imbalance in your digestion.
You can also think about digestive fire as your body internally having to raise the temperature of the food you eat and cooking it internally. So, when you eat a baked piece of warm apple pie instead of eating a raw apple, the warm apple pie can be helpful to your digestion, and you could get more nutrients from the apple pie as well. So, people with weakened digestion should be eating more cooked foods.
Because many people eat cold milk with cereal in the morning, and other cooling foods such as yogurt they could diminish their digestive fire gradually. This happens gradually as we age, and can cause many other health difficulties to begin. One of the reason for the other health difficulties is you won’t absorb as many nutrients. And sometimes most importantly you can create congestion in your meridians, those invisible channels of energy that feed energy to your organs which the Chinese discovered thousands of years ago.
Congestion in the meridians is like having a knot in a hose that is used to water the garden. If it gets too tight, the energy that is used to “water” your garden is reduced.
Eating too much yogurt for example, can cause you internal cold, congestion and chronic upset tummy unless it’s balanced. Even if the yogurt is beneficial for regularity, it could cause health difficulty in the long-term. In fact now with the popular use of probiotics drinks as seen in commercials, what most people do not know is that they are a concentrated cooling drink. These probiotics drinks are very helpful in the summer to cool the body. But in the winter one has to be careful to eat more warming soups, and warming foods in general.
If you have weakened your digestive fire, you have most certainly have weakened your digestion.
Even with the best of diets, you could have a tendency to weakened digestion.
People who have weakened digestive fire, may always want warm food, or love to eat butter. They want their food very hot, and it has to get to the table quickly and stay hot. And eating cold food is also not appetizing. In fact children often intuitively will not eat cold food, or food that gets cold quickly because they know intuitively they have weakened digestion.
In the elderly symptoms of weakened digestive fire are more pronounced, but are the same for those who are younger. Here are just a few: you can have an aversion to cold, cold hands and feet, frequent urination (especially at night) or a constant need for bodily warmth. You may love saunas, but when you break out into a sweat after a workout -- you feel awful with the cold clammy sweat. You may always want to wear a sweater all the time, or have the heat on high in the house all the time as well.
Butter is one of the foods, which is warming or supporting to the digestive fire. In fact in Ayurvedic medicine (an ancient Indian medicine), ghee is a food derived from clarified butter and used therapeutically to increase digestive fire. Therapeutically in this case means to perform a special diet, or take some food several times a day for a specific health benefit. Therapeutic cleanses usually last 7 days, and some involve a significant change in diet. For example, avoiding meats, milk, yogurt for a special therapeutic cleanse.
Even if you eat a warm cereal, in other words warm the milk up, but you use soy milk, you could be cooling your digestive fire, and body.
Soybeans are cooling, and so is soy milk.
So it becomes especially important if soy milk is vibrationally resonant with you that you add in warming spices to your cereal, or even take them therapeutically. When you consume tofu frequently you have also added another cooling food to the diet.
If you love to use cinnamon, it may be important to grind the cinnamon up into a powder fresh, and sprinkle a small amount in your cereal.
Although I’ve been mentioning the cooling nature of eating breakfast cereals with milk in the morning, there are of course people who just need to eat cooling foods because their body is naturally the “hot type”. Mostly however, people tend to weaken their digestion as they age.
So, when you think of supporting the digestive fire, you can now think of a property of a food or herb, which either warms the digestion, in other words supports it, or on the other hand, cools it with some cooling herb or food.
Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, peppers, and many other warming spices if used in small therapeutic quantities can keep the body warm in the winter, and keep the digestive fire up. Garlic and onions are also two warming foods, which can keep the body warm and help the digestive fire.
What keeps the digestive fire stoked does not necessarily have to be warm or hot in temperature, in other words a hot plate of food or soup with onions or garlic. For example, you could eat a piece of cinnamon twig at room temperature, and it is warming to your digestion and the body. Cinnamon twig is warming, but cinnamon bark is so warming it is considered hot.
Therefore, if you eat cereal with sprinkles of freshly ground cinnamon on it, that addition could mitigate the colder temperature of the milk and therefore it’s negative impact on your body. Consider however, that when you are adding fresh apples slices, or some other fruit to your breakfast cereal, the net effect can still be cooling, hopefully slightly cooling but the whole breakfast meal could balance itself nicely.
It is important to point out that the literal use of cold food or drink we often consume every day. Did grandma ever tell you to just drink fluids at room temperature? Nowadays with the availability of the refrigerator we chill everything, and drink and eat chilled food even in the winter.
Many people literally use cold or chilled drinks with ice in them during a meal, and eat ice-cream on a regular basis and diminish their digestive fire unknowingly. Beer is one of the most cooling drinks.
While on the topic of cooling foods, there are a few tropical fruits, which I’d like to mention that are very cooling or cold. Avocados, bananas, mangoes, are 3 such tropical fruits we often eat much of in the America and Canada. Papaya, although a tropical fruit is actually a neutral fruit, so it is not included in this list.
To stress the point about cooling foods and fruits more clearly here, I will mention that when you eat bananas that are at room temperature, they are still cooling to the body. If you take them out of the fridge and then eat them they are cold to begin with and still cooling. If you bake them in banana bread, that changes the cooling effect to a more warming one. Eating raw bananas, however, can also be helpful in the summer when you need a little cooling. Bananas are also high in potassium.
It was very interesting to find an extremely simple recipe in Reverend Hanna Kroeger’s Book: Spices to the Rescue which details how if you cannot eat bananas without feeling ill, then you could try a certain warming spice to counteract the effect. A feeling of illness after eating a cooling food could be fatigue, dizziness, sleepiness, excess urination, and weakness in the muscles, and loss of energy in the afternoon.
This balancing of eating the banana and taking a pinch of a spice afterwards makes sense when you consider the balancing of the cooling banana with the warming nature of the spice.
There are several warming spices. In actuality Reverend Hanna Kroeger’s suggestion is more about counteracting the cooling effect of the bananas, rather than healing to the digestion. You would have to take the spice therapeutically perhaps in capsules to have a net positive effect on the digestion. I make this point because internally a person who cannot digest fruits has internal cold, and needs more warming and cooked foods.
In general however it would be better to examine the diet on a whole for all the cooling foods. In the above example, you could also consider that “bananas” are a food a person is “allergic” to. This is not a real allergy, where you go to the allergist and he finds you react to them with a skin test.
The same temporary “allergy” can hold true for the other tropical fruits.
For example, were you previously able to eat avocados, mangoes, but after several years of eating them, you no longer could? The reason may be that they cooled off your digestion fire. Some people cannot have lime juice or lemon juice either. After consuming these cooling foods for several years you would have cold energy in the meridians, a very common health difficulty for people. Sometimes people who eat cooling foods, even just apples get a stomach ache, or feel a sharp pain in the gut after eating them.
One other simple way to look at the effect these out of season foods have on the body is to consider that these foods are native to a country where there is very warm weather almost year round, and relative to your native climate, perhaps a lot warmer weather!
This distinction of where foods are grown is an important point because we’ve grown up with the availability of all these tropical fruits and many more, and we may hardly realize the long-term effects of these nutritious and delicious fruits.
To make the point even more poignant, you could be in a northern state or province, and eat grapefruits in the winter, and frequently in the summer, but end up cooling off your digestive fire. In the end you could have a net negative energetic effect on your kidneys as well.
To name a few more cooling foods: they are
Of particular importance I want to mention here is the use of salt or seaweeds, because these are cooling, as much as they are beneficial. Some diets such as the macrobiotic diet make extensive use of salt and seaweed.
Two wonderful juices that are also cooling and frequently consumed are cranberry juice, and the now popular pomegranate juice.
Both of these drinks are wonderful in the summer when they can cool you off on a hot day, and perhaps more nutritious than ice-cold lemonade.
However, if you regularly consume these drinks it’s worth noting that they are cooling.
The excessive use of these fruit drinks and orange juice are not recommended during a cold, or flu, unless balanced because they could drive the cold into your body even further and then prolong it.
Cranberry juice however is worth noting as a sour drink. In fact the commercial cranberry juice most people buy has added sugar in it, so that the drink is sweet and sour! The reason I mention this point is that most people are lacking in the sour flavor, so a glass of cranberry juice may be good for you at least once a week!
Eating yogurt on a regular basis is good for digestion because the good bacteria or flora of yogurt replenishes the flora in your intestines. Yogurt thus helps us move our bowels regularly since that is part of the flora's job. There are now yogurts with specific good bowel bacteria that increase regularity if eaten consistently.
However yogurt is a cooling food.
Remember to be mindful of balancing cooling foods, and also foods that are cold right out of the fridge. I myself love yogurt, and could eat a large amount of it everyday. I especially love eating yogurt with fresh blueberries in the summer.
However, two reasons I don’t eat yogurt every day is because it’s cooling, and because I need different nutrients everyday.
Incidentally Hanna Kroeger Healer has received information that the Vibrational resonance of consuming yogurt would only be positive if consumed in the evening for some people.
For others eating yogurt at night was not optimally beneficial, and morning or afternoon was the optimal time.
Vibrational resonance points to the answers without considering a myriad of scientific questions or understanding the genetics of the person or their internal energy imbalances.
With society’s avoidance of fat containing foods, it is worth noting what a high quality yogurt is. Fat-free yogurts should in general be avoided because they often contain sugar in them. A high-quality yogurt is one that contains natural fat, and is naturally sweetened. There is however no reason that one cannot eat plain yogurt, with at least 2% fat and above. I personally enjoy 5% plain yogurt. I find it delicious. And it is completely plain. No modified starch ingredients, or any other additives, or sugar substitutes.
Since many new yogurts contain additional fiber in them, fruit, and different beneficial flora for your gut, it is worth ensuring that the yogurt you consume is vibrationally resonant with you in the long-term. Ensure you are not allergic to any additional ingredients.
In actuality Healing and Strengthening the digestion is best done with multi-ingredient formulas because they are better balanced and therefore are targeted toward a specific organ system.
This kind of herbal formula would be a Vibrational formula. If you have seen the example Vibrational Reading on-line, you have perhaps seen an example of the Vibrational Formulas used in the Vibrational Reading. One of these is called Earth Tonify. In Traditional Chinese Medicine the Earth Element is associated with the organs responsible for the digestion of food. Those Earth Element organs are the spleen, and the stomach.
You can think of food coming from the Earth, and therefore the association is easy to remember. To improve digestion we would tonify or strengthen the Earth element. This formula is also warming to the digestion, as well as giving it strength.
Whenever you want to Heal any health difficulty in your body, it’s important to pay attention that your thoughts and good feelings are in the direction of feeling good -- feeling well-being. If you want to pay more careful attention to your digestion: how well you digest your food, what nutrients and what foods you need in the morning, you could focus your thoughts on your digestive well-being as you possibly change your diet and get assistance with a Vibrational Reading.
This content is copyrighted © 2010 by Hanna Kroeger Healer