Build basic platforms for each meal. Breakfast: Rule of thumb is to aim for a combination of five fruits and vegetables a day or a total of five fruits per day. Breakfast is the easiest time to get in over half your fruits. A high fiber cereal will become your mainstay for breakfast, and equally important is fruit. Add any three fruits to your cereal — bananas, strawberries and blueberries go well together. Fiber is one of the best foods you can eat for a good intestinal tract. Not only does fiber help protect you from colon cancer, but it also improves bowel movements. A high fiber breakfast will give you a regularity that will take care of any constipation you may have. It regulates your bowels because fiber is not easily absorbed and it moves through your intestines quicker and at the same time, absorbs water in your colon, making your stools soft. Without the straining associated with constipation, there is less build-up of pressure within the colon that commonly results in small out-pouching of the wall of the colon. These little out-pouches are about as large as the end of your little finger and are called diverticula. These can become infected and cause what is termed diverticulitis; or they can rupture and require an operation. The British Medical Journal reported that those who eat more than 25 grams of fiber a day have a 41 percent reduced risk of being hospitalized or dying of diverticulitis complications, when compared to individuals who ate less than 14 grams of fiber daily. The medical literature emphasizes that eating fiber is the best protection against diverticulosis or diverticulitis. Fiber is what breakfast is all about. Fiber One cereal has the highest fiber content of the common cereals. Cereal alternatives for fiber include steel-cut oats as your oatmeal. Steel-cut has the outer covering intact for extra fiber. On your breakfast platform, you will use skim milk with zero saturated fat. Almond milk, soy milk, and rice milk contain no saturated fat, so your LDL cholesterol will not become elevated. If you are tired of cereal one morning and want to cook or order a different breakfast, go for an egg-white veggie omelet with whole grain toast and jelly of some sort. Some say eggbeaters are quicker to fix. And there is that old quick, in a hurry, got to get to the office — toast and jelly. Whole grain and dry toast, that is — without adding butter. Begin your Prescription For Life plan in the morning for breakfast.
