High-fat breakfast may raise heart risks

Within an hour of eating a large high-fat, high-carbohydrate breakfast, the body starts making inflammatory chemicals associated with clogged arteries, a new study has found. These inflammatory factors stay high for three to four hours, and that’s when many people sit down to another meal.

“This kind of eating probably keeps the average American in an inflammatory state all day. Thank God he sleeps at night,” said Dr. Paresh Dandona, the study’s senior author. This nearly continuous state of inflammation, he said, helps explain why obese people are at higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Dandona, chief of endocrinology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and several colleagues studied nine normal-weight adults who fasted overnight before eating a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, a Sausage McMuffin and two servings of hash-brown potatoes. (That meal came in at 910 calories, with 81 grams of carbohydrates, 51 grams of fat and 32 grams of protein.) Dandona said many people regularly consume even less healthful meals.

The nine breakfast eaters were compared with eight normal-weight adults, each of whom was given a 10-ounce glass of water after an overnight fast. Researchers tested participants’ blood before they ate or drank anything and then one, two and three hours afterward. The calorie-laden breakfast increased levels of free radicals, C-reactive protein and nuclear factor-kappa B, a protein that triggers the release of inflammatory chemicals.

“This substantiates what scientists have been saying all along: Don’t overeat,” said Cathy Kapica, director of global nutrition for McDonald’s Corp. in Oak Brook, Ill. Results of the latest study appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.