Recently, on The Adelaide Show Podcast, I shared a breakfast coffee with Dr James Muecke AM, former Australian Of The Year and Opthamologist, ahead of our discussion about sugar in our diet and the virtues of intermittent fasting.

Intermittent fasting is when you pause your eating, typically after your evening meal, and don’t “break your fast” for 14-16 hours.

The rationale behind this is to do with allowing your body to fully process the food you’ve been eating and have an extended period of time in which it is not producing an insulin response (something your body does when it detects sugar), thus allowing your body to move from dealing with sugars and storing some of them as fat, to being able to draw upon your fat reserves to fuel your body’s operation.

There are things to consider before adopting this lifestyle (please talk to your GP) but for Dr James Muecke, he’s seen patients suffering type 2 diabetes without understanding these mechanisms. As a result, they keep eating foods that trigger the body to release insulin, they end up storing fat, and they move into chronic illness territory. All the while, some simple dietary changes could be saving them from a life of pain and discomfort.

In the interview, however, Dr Muecke explains that there is quite a lot of vested interest in keeping sugar deeply entrenched in our lives – from additives to foods, to advertising and to undiagnosed living under the influence of addiction to this toxin.

It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, and I commend it to you.

Breakfast coffee, discussed on The Adelaide Show Podcast

You can see the show episode notes and listen to the interview here: Sugar vs Dr James Muecke.

Alternatively, you can listen on this player, noting that his discussion about breakfast coffee starts around the 11-minute mark.

As a side note, I do intermittent fasting most weekdays, using a few short black Baristador Coffee B70 Benchmark Blend espressos to tide me over during the morning and early afternoon fasting period. When you take tea or sugar black, it doesn’t trigger the sugar response that we try to avoid at these times.

And some good friends of mine do the same, but with our fully decaf blend, the B01 Benchmark Blend.