Just eating something for breakfast does not make you any healthier, in fact, most breakfast foods only tear your body down even more than if you had skipped it all together.
So here, in alphabetical order, are the biggest breakfast fails. And of course at the bottom I'll tell you the trick to having a truly healthy breakfast.
Biscuits (in the American sense of the word) - High in calories and terrifically high in sodium. If you want puffy skin and a pot belly this is the food for you!
Cereal - I've written about this many times, but for the record, cereal is a terrible breakfast choice. Most of them are full of sugar and salt (oftentimes more per 100 grams than a cola or pack of chips), and in general dried grains are a very calorie dense food. In just a matter of minutes you can down 300 calories of cereal, get jacked up on the sugar hit, and come down with a crash at 10:30 am, which will have you crabbily reaching for another sugary snack mid-morning. And worst of all, cereal can't be eaten with anything besides at best some chopped fruit. If you're eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast there's very little chance that you'll be having any vegetables in addition.
Cinnamon Roll - The Starbucks in my area lists the calories of all the foods in the glass case. And the cinnamon roll is the King Kong of the bunch, weighing in at 630 calories. That's a lot of energy that will likely go unused, and when energy goes unused it goes right into your fat stores. Worst of all, you'll experience that 10:30 crash all the same, despite consuming enough calories to account for a third of your daily amount. To put things in perspective, 630 calories is the equivalent of eating 230 spears of asparagus. That's a lot of food.
Danish - I just pulled Danish as a representative of any one of the many pastries that we consider breakfast foods. Pastries are wonderful, buttery, sugary, creamy treats for the senses. But don't fool yourself into thinking that you're eating anything other than a candybar for breakfast.
Doughnut - Sugar glazed with sugar. You're going to feel awful if you make this the main chunk of your breakfast calories. Terrible.
French Toast - Toast in and of itself is ok, but when you cook it up with eggs and sugar and top it with butter and syrup you've just turned it into junk food. Not to mention that like most of the foods on this list, it can't be topped or mixed with vegetables.
Grits - A very salty, calorie dense way to start the day. If you don't know what these even are then keep it that way.
Hashbrowns - Potatos are a fine, proud vegetable. But if you're eating hasbrowns you've just fooled yourself into having french fries for breakfast. Nice work!
Muesli - Most muesli uses malted grains and nuts (i.e. candy covered), but even the sugar free versions run into the same problems as cereal, it's a ton of calories entering your body very quickly, none of them chased with vegetables. And the dried fruit in muesli is a red herring. Dried fruit means that you're eating pure fructose in a form that doesn't fill you up (because there's no water in it). A piece of real fruit will get you much farther in life.
Muffins - There is absolutely no difference between eating a muffin and eating a big slice of cake for breakfast. I'd prefer you eat the cake, at least then you're not deluding yourself into thinking you ate a breakfast food.
Oatmeal - Like its brothers cereal and muesli, this is a calorie dense food that is usually sweetened and is going to leave you hanging in just a few hours, cursing under your breath as you fumble for change to put in the vending machine.
Pancake - Cake in a pan. What could go wrong?
Pop Tart - I can imagine few worse foods on earth. Two of these things will put a 400 calorie hurt on you, and all of those calories come from highly refined grains and artificial sweeteners. I'd rather you eat the 630 calorie cinnamon roll, at least it was made from real ingredients.
Toast and Jam - Putting jam on toast robs you of the ability to combine some vegetables with it. It means you'll be eating your carbs with a veneer of sugar, rather than with some real food.
Waffles - Cake for breakfast again! Yay! With little squares to better catch the liquid sugar we're going to pour over it!As you can see, the reasons these breakfasts fail fall into two broad categories.
• They are very high in sugar, salt, and overall calories and/or
• They make it difficult to eat any vegetables for breakfast. You're basically swallowing a meal of pure carbohydrates for each and every one of these choices.
So what's the alternative? You need to open your mind about what a breakfast food is. In the West, we've somehow gotten this cultural legacy that breakfast has to be a sweet carb, an egg cooked in some form, and a greasy piece of meat. It doesn't have to be this way. In Japan a traditional breakfast consists of fish, miso soup, vegetables and rice. That's the kind of thing we'd call dinner. But on that Japanese breakfast plate is a great balance of carbs, protein, fiber, and nutrients. With that kind of start, you'll have a good chance of making it to lunch without resorting to a Trente© cup of coffee or a mid-morning sugar hit.
The simplest advice I can give is to make your carbs vegetable delivery systems. You need to be eating more vegetables, especially at breakfast, but very few of you are going to have the discipline to eat a plate of vegetables at 7:30 am. So you need to have the veggies hijack your carbs and go along for the ride. Instead of covering your toast with sugary jam, cover it with a ton of lightly sauteed vegetables. Instead of having scrambled eggs plain on the side of a pancake, fill them up with vegetables. Vegetables vegetables vegetables. Cool it with the sugarcarbs and eat vegetables. Vegetables are the best breakfast food. (For other examples read this post)
A lot of people have a huge mental block about eating vegetables. They say they don't have time in the morning, that they always heard muesli was very healthy, that it just doesn't feel right to have a big complex meal so early.
They are also usually 20-30 pounds overweight and wondering why they can't seem to slim down.
So there you are, reading, nodding your head wisely, and seeing the logic of all this. But tomorrow morning will be here before you know it. What's going to be on your plate?
Great post, Patrick! Before PCP, these foods were my breakfast!
ReplyDeleteIt's all true.....and yet....I gotta tell you that all these rules go out the window the minute you're pregnant. Then you eat whatever your body tells you it can tolerate (or develops a powerful craving for) at the moment of hunger. It so happens that for me right now, that includes a daily bowl of cornflakes with lots of milk and a sliced banana (not necessarily for breakfast). I figure it's because I need the calcium (not usually a big milk drinker, or a cereal eater for that matter) and the nutrients in the banana. The 'flakes are just for bulk, although they are also fortified with all those B vitamins that pregnant women are supposed to need astronomical amounts of.
ReplyDeleteI realize you're writing for non-pregnant people who are looking to fuel their bodies for optimum physical output -- and I am totally on board with protein and veggies for breakfast, for those not suffering from morning sickness -- but I just wanted to give an additional angle.
Yes, thank you Patrick for these delightful reminders that most of us (esp. Americans) are eating sugar on top of sugar for breakfast!
ReplyDeleteI love vegetables and rice. And being Chinese, this is very standard to have at any meal of the day. But growing up in the States, I'm met with odd looks when people hear I'm having a "dinner" for my "breakfast," that is, if I even eat breakfast at all (I skip breakfast almost every day and prefer to intermittent fast until the afternoon).
And there we have it. Delusion in the masses. And at the cost of our waistlines, our health, our pocketbooks. Shame.