A bowl of cereal with milk – the archetypal speedy, bolt-it-down-before-you-bolt-out-the-door British breakfast. Indeed the nation’s favourite breakfast according to numerous polls.
The tradition of breakfast goes back to the Middle Ages. Of course it literally means ‘break your fast’. Back then, it wouldn’t have been eaten first thing in the morning, it would have been taken mid or late morning, after several hours’ physical labour, and might have consisted of bread and ale (ale was a lot weaker back then), maybe with a bit of cheese, or cold meat, or beef dripping. Or it might have been leftovers from the previous day’s evening meal. There were only 2 meals a day at that point, breakfast, and dinner. The nobility went in for more fancy, leisurely cooked breakfasts, especially when entertaining guests.
The age of exploration brought new flavours and ingredients to Europe, forever changing the breakfast landscape, as tea, coffee and chocolate became popular morning drinks. Coffee houses became popular across Europe from the 18th century.
Bacon was first cured in the early 18th century, and as we moved through the Georgian era and into Victorian times, the industrial revolution was upon us, and we started to see the middle class emerging, who also had working occupations. Seeking to emulate the nobility, they would often have a cooked breakfast in the morning, before heading off to work in offices. The working classes followed suit, loading up on a cooked breakfast ahead of their gruelling days in the factories, and even as late as the 1950s, half the population still went out to work on a proper fry-up.
By the early 20th century, there were also some new kids in town. People like William Kellogg started to see the commercial potential of breakfast cereals. These processed grains were essentially toasted starch with some added sugar, could be produced very cheaply and sold very profitably, with enough in the budget for clever marketing, and they also chimed with the general health advice to avoid eating too much fat.
The nutritious, fat-containing parts of the grain are removed before, in the case of Corn Flakes for example, corn grits are superheated in pressure cookers for several hours, then rolled flat and toasted. Because they’re mainly toasted starch, which has minimal nutritional value, they’re also fortified with various industrially produced vitamins, which gives the company more to shout about as regards supposed health benefits. There’s a good 40% profit margin in cereal, which given how much of it is eaten these days, makes it extremely big business.
It's no surprise that they took off the way they did. A lot of them contain quite a lot of sugar, which makes them super-palatable. And the manufacturers massage the facts on the packaging about how much sugar is in there, by calling a portion size about 30g. Show me a person who only eats 30g of breakfast cereal… most people eat 2 or 3 times that. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pour a bowl of cereal with milk than it is to get the grill pan out and start making bacon & eggs, and there’s adverts for it with catchy slogans, and sometimes cartoon characters for the kids, telling you how healthy it is for you.
For the whole of the second half of the 20th century and beyond, we were having it drummed into us that we should be eating a low fat diet for optimal health, so cereal was just one of many types of low fat ‘ready-made food’ that was springing up.
We now know an awful lot more about fat and that, of course, not all fats are equal. We now also know that not only are good sources of fat not going to do us any harm in decent quantities, eating a diet very low in good fats is going to do us harm. Harm to hormone health, harm to brain health, to pick just two.
Nobody was looking at sugar and carbs particularly back then. The last 50 years has seen a truly dramatic rise in the numbers of people developing type 2 diabetes. According to the World Health Organisation, since 1980 the number of adults living with diabetes has quadrupled worldwide to a staggering 422 million today, with 1.5 million deaths being attributed to diabetes each year.
It’s now well-known that continual blood sugar dysregulation over years and years leads to insulin resistance and eventually type 2 diabetes. And there’s now significant research supporting the link between poor blood sugar regulation over decades and the development of Alzheimer’s dementia, to the point where Alzheimer’s has started to be referred to as Type 3 diabetes.
When you get up in the morning, in a fasted state, what do you think it does to your blood sugar levels if the first thing you throw at your digestive system is a bowl of starchy sugary cereal and milk…?
Basically, it’s a super-efficient way to check yourself on to a blood sugar rollercoaster for the day. Most likely, your blood glucose will shoot up quite dramatically, and then an hour or two later it will start to plummet. Cue the 11am energy dip and carb cravings when the biscuits in the staff kitchen become too hard to resist. And repeat. It’s starting to look quite easy to make some links between sugary breakfasts and overeating and weight issues as well, isn’t it?
So actually, the pre-cereal cooked breakfast crew probably had the right idea. Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes – a great mix of protein, fat, fibre, vitamins and minerals – and you won’t be hungry till lunchtime. Still, all those nitrates in the bacon…..perhaps not bacon everyday then.. Last night’s leftovers can be good too.
If you absolutely can’t face losing your morning cereal, but you want to balance your blood sugar better, and frankly eat something with a bit more nutritional value, you’re going to need to make some tweaks.
Add some protein, fats and extra fibre in the form of full fat yoghurt, nuts & seeds if you want to reduce the sugar spike. Going for a walk right after eating will also help with that, so get yourself out round the block if you’re working from home, or head off on your commute. If Jessie Inchauspé aka Glucose Goddess has got it right, you can also reduce the glucose spike of a meal by having a glass of water with some vinegar in it before eating.
Apparently the nation’s favourite cereal is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes (according to several polls). With a whacking 35g of sugar per 100g, frankly that’s not breakfast, it’s pudding!
Watch this space for my top 10 favourite healthy, blood-sugar-balancing breakfasts….
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