The hold that breakfast exerts on our national imagination is strange and powerful. We tend to be more entrenched in our beliefs about this meal than any other, both about its importance and about the merits and identity of constituent parts, and it is the medium for fierce debate about local traditions and ingredients.
The most celebrated – some would say notorious – expression of our national obsession, the Full English Breakfast, has become a totemic presence on hotel and restaurant menus: a fried form of the national identity, with red or brown sauce on the side.
But experts in diet, nutrition and the history of food suggest that many of our most cherished beliefs about breakfast are quite wrong, the result of a still-tumbling avalanche of marketing by mass manufacturers keen to have us consume their processed and often salt- and sugar-laden products. Much of what we think we know about the first meal of the day is mistaken, and there are questions that we should all be asking before we reach for those old familiar packets.
Does All-Bran really improve gut health? Is muesli healthy? Do instant oats really give you all the benefits of oats in a quick and convenient microwaveable packet?
"Breakfast itself is a relatively new invention," says Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London and author of Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Food Is Wrong. "There isn't much evidence that hunter-gatherer tribes ate breakfast. There isn't much evidence that people 500 years ago ate breakfast.
!["We [in the West] are the only culture that has strict ideas about what we eat in the morning," says Professor Tim Spector. Photo / Frankie Shutterbug, Unsplash](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/BOMNAJZNEHG2YNZCARUKUCBXCY.jpg?auth=2ff2614f837f4ee9ffcad10760ecd7ca9af6ced5f63f94a33abaf15b38ba9b48&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
"There's been very little research into it. A lot of the science about eating early in the day is becoming shakier and shakier. It works for some people, and doesn't work for others."
In short, what Spector has dubbed "the breakfast myth" is itself "up for grabs".
"It's one of the NHS's eight tips for healthy eating that we shouldn't skip it, but there's no data to support that," he continues.
Indeed, subsequent meta-analysis of some of the studies behind those claims has suggested the reverse. Before blowing this breakfast myth open, however, a caveat: experimenting with skipping breakfast is not advisable if you are young, have struggled with eating disorders, or have any other special dietary requirements.
If that's not you, then strap in, because the modern tale of breakfast in Britain is a bizarre and often baffling one. According to food writer Felicity Cloake, who spent more than a year researching the past and present of the British breakfast for her book Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey, "Historically, breakfast wasn't really eaten until around the 17th century" – which is when the wealthy started to designate "breakfast rooms" in their homes.
As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, breakfast was embedded: labourers needed a meal to sustain them before work, and the habit caught on across all classes. Still, we didn't have set ideas around what we eat. "Looking at Victorian recipes and menus, everything from mushroom curry to fried sole was fair game," says Cloake. "The quintessential 'English' breakfast is basically a 20th-century creation."
She notes that bacon and eggs were what the "man of the house" would have in poorer households, but quite why we decided that dish should be the true British breakfast remains a mystery. "Many other countries lost their tradition of a heavy breakfast before work, so I wonder whether it was because it was unusual and set us apart from others on the continent. And because it's a widespread signature dish more than a regional speciality, it united the country."
Either way, the fry-up was born and helped forge a peculiarly British attitude towards breakfast – even after its fall from grace in the 1960s, when the sugar industry paid scientists to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and instead demonise fat. Breakfast cereals and low-fat yoghurts rushed into the gap left by bacon, sausages and eggs, and we – under the considerable influence of clever advertising – transferred to these foods our rule-bound ideas about breakfast.
"We [in the West] are the only culture that has strict ideas about what we eat in the morning," says Spector. "If you go to India, they have last night's curry for breakfast. In Japan and China, there's no real difference between breakfast and lunch food."
Congee, grits, rice pudding, polenta – all are forms of porridge from around the world, and none of them is eaten solely at breakfast, says Cloake. Our national decision to designate it a breakfast food is singular and recent. In Scotland, and much of England, people have eaten porridge for centuries: "In the 19th century, an MP for the Highlands references the fact that his constituents eat porridge three times a day."
As the fields of dietetics and nutritional research have expanded in the past 50 years, so breakfast has become more complicated. Spector points out that when breakfast cereals debuted, "we assumed they were healthy – mainly because of the marketing and publicity. There was little research on it, other than when we started to be concerned about the sugar content of cereals."
Highly processed
Since then, they have become more of a bête noire. The chief problem is the processing: the cooking, rolling, cutting, reconstituting, blending and puffing of the various grains you find in breakfast cereals raise their sugar content and reduce their natural fibre and nutritional value. "These foods are so highly processed, there's not much structure that reaches the lower part of the gut, so sugars are released early into the bloodstream," says Spector.
And while the manufacturers add vitamins and minerals back in – in chemical form – there is no knowing whether they have opted for the cheapest possible supplements. "The iron, for example, may not be absorbed at all. It may just pass straight through. In many ways, breakfast cereals are the equivalent of the supplements market: they make these huge claims on the packet, without providing any evidence that these things enter the bloodstream."
He says the upshot is that we are fooled into eating what is effectively fake food, "when you'd be better off having leftovers from last night's meal, or an egg, or a full-fat yoghurt" – a low-fat diet being yet another food fad to have been blown open by more recent research. In 2017, McMaster University in Ontario, which studied 135,000 people in 18 countries over a decade, found that those who ate the least fats were a quarter more likely to die early – suggesting that what people replace meat and full-fat dairy products with could turn out to be more dangerous than the saturated fats themselves.
Given the enormous sway cereal brands have had over the British and American idea of a healthy breakfast, it seems reasonable that they are now being subjected to some scrutiny. Every year since 2019, the Food Foundation charity has conducted the Broken Plate report, documenting the health of our food system and the impact it has on our lives. Its latest report, released last month, concluded that most breakfast cereals fail to meet the green rating under the Government's front-of-pack nutritional labelling guidance for levels of sugar and saturated fat – and many remain red.
The health halo
According to nutritionist Katharine Jenner, director of Action on Sugar, the report shows that while cereal brands have made some steps to reduce sugar, salt and saturated fat, they have much further to travel. Imagery and labelling, for example, continue to be misleading. "You can have an unhealthy cereal, spray on vitamin B or iron supplements, and make a vitamin B or iron claim," she notes – regardless of the quality of these nutrients or how easily your body can access them.
"We find if you put a health claim on food, it has a 'health halo' effect, which stops you scrutinising the nutrition panel and seeing what's really in the food and whether it relates to the product."
Meanwhile, those cereals that are not necessarily healthy can trade off the reputations of foods that are. Sometimes this is explicit. "Weetabix is a good cereal," says Jenner, "but chuck some chocolate chips in it and it's high in sugar. Still, Weetabix Chocolate carries the 'health halo' of Weetabix." See also Frosted Shreddies and Golden Syrup Quaker Oats.
More subtle are cereals that trade off the reputations of whole foods, when the amount of processing entailed in their production renders them practically unrecognisable: dried fruit pieces, which are invariably more refined sugar than anything else, imply all the benefits of fresh fruit; instant oats, which are partially cooked, then rolled even thinner to reduce their cooking time, carry the health halo of whole oats.
Recently, porridge has been going through a fashionable phase all of its own, at least among a certain stratum of the population. ("It's interesting that what was once a subsistence food is now quite a middle-class food," Cloake says wryly.) Yet there is a long and large difference between whole, steel-cut oats, and the pale imitations you find in packets of instant or even rolled oats.
Though popularly considered to be the king of cereals from a health point of view, porridge sent Spector's blood sugar soaring when he studied it himself. "The instant oats resulted in a very big [blood glucose] peak; jumbo rolled oats slightly less; steel-cut oats resulted in only a very slight peak. That's all about processing. Steel-cut oats still have the core husk and fibre of the original product. Very few cereals have that."
"The standard of the British carb breakfast leads some people to overeating without them knowing it," adds Spector, whose research – conducted through Zoe, the world's largest nutrition science study – has found many people experience a blood-sugar spike after such a breakfast, followed by a dip three hours later.
His belief – not one supported by Public Health England – is that "many people don't need breakfast and would be better off without it. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 11 randomised trials of skipping breakfast concluded that those who skip it are no worse off than those who eat it, in terms of weight gain and metabolic rate," he says. "It even suggested a slight reduction in weight in people who regularly skip it in favour of black coffee – which is healthy, containing fibre and polyphenols."
The best thing we can do, in Spector's thoroughly researched and well-substantiated opinion, is work out what suits us as individuals, either through experimenting with eating different things at different times or through a personalised nutrition test, such as the Zoe app. Our metabolisms are highly individual: some people wake up starving and like to front-load; some prefer to breakfast later; some would rather run through to lunchtime on just a coffee. "It's interesting how at the weekends many of us do that naturally, and wait until brunch."
That said, our 9-to-5s are as unique as our metabolisms. Like me, Cloake prefers to breakfast about 11am – but because she works from home, she can control what she eats better than people working in hospitals, schools, factories and even many offices, which don't always have good options nearby. Registered dietitian Dr Frankie Phillips, spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, strongly recommends that such people should still eat before they leave home. "You will get hungry at some point, and if you're at home you have more control, rather than relying on cafés or vending machines," she tells me. If you aren't hungry first thing, she suggests taking something along the lines of her homemade breakfast cereal recipe, which is included above.
Whether you are breakfasting at home, on the hoof or not until lunch, try to eat as diversely as possible. "From a gut-health point of view, you want a diversity of plants," says Spector.
If you are a creature of habit who really needs the familiarity of your favourite cereal at breakfast, mix it up a bit, says Jenner. Add fresh fruit, seeds and nuts. Have it with yoghurt or kefir. "Carbohydrates should be from wholegrains to give you energy and to protect your heart health, and fibre for gut health. Protein can make you feel fuller, as well as being important for growth and repair. Whole fruit and vegetables are valuable sources of vitamins, minerals and fibre." Breakfast, like any other meal, "should be low in salt, sugar and saturated fat".
This bodes well for the direction breakfast appears to be taking in the UK, which is bigger, better – and later. "People are becoming much more open-minded about what to have for breakfast, and not just because they're hungover," Cloake observes. "The popularity of brunch has encouraged that." A look at the menu of a favourite London brunch spot reveals breakfast ramen, pea fritter and shakshuka, as well as porridge and the usual egg and bacon-based staples – which it serves all day, not just until lunch.
"For the first time since Victorian times, we are broadening our horizons when it comes to breakfast," says Cloake. "We've been conservative for 150 years, and now we're coming back to that."
It's been a wild ride, but like all meals, breakfast boils down to the usual principles: eat a diverse range of whole foods, in moderation, when you're hungry – and limit your sugar.
The ideal breakfast
According to Dr Frankie Phillips, the ideal breakfast would combine unrefined wholegrains, a dairy or a fortified dairy alternative to provide calcium, some nuts, if you can, and some fruit. "All of these elements give you a different range of nutrients," she says. An orange, or orange juice, provides vitamin C, which will help absorb the iron from the wholegrains – though if it's juice, be sure to get one without added sugars.
Steel-cut oats
Steel-cut oats are the best option as far as porridge – and, indeed, breakfast cereal – is concerned, because they are most closely related to the whole, unprocessed oat kernel, says Professor Tim Spector. They take longer to prepare – about 15-30 minutes – but retain all the nutrition of the original oat groat, and the cooking time is reduced if you soak them or cook them in a rice cooker or Aga overnight. Add chopped dried fruit, fruit compote and a sprinkle of nuts or seeds (or a dollop of sugar-free peanut butter), or enjoy a piece of fruit alongside.
Weetabix/Shredded Wheat
Both Katharine Jenner and Tim Spector agree that Weetabix and Shredded Wheat are good cereals – so long as you are buying the originals, not the pimped-up versions. They are made from about 89 to 95 per cent wholegrain wheat and are minimally processed. There is added sugar and salt, but the amount is very small compared with other cereals. The nutrients derived from Weetabix and Shredded Wheat largely come from the wheat itself, rather than supplements. As with porridge, add chopped dried fruit, fruit compote and a sprinkle of nuts or seeds (or a dollop of sugar-free peanut butter), or enjoy a piece of fruit alongside.
Poached eggs and spinach on sourdough toast
The cholesterol in egg yolk has led to eggs being demonised in the past, says Govindji – but dietary cholesterol has very little impact on your blood cholesterol, so you can enjoy these eggs with a clear conscience. Meanwhile, low glycaemic index (GI) foods can help to keep your blood-sugar levels steady – and sourdough bread has a lower GI than many other breads, even if it's white.
Smashed avocado and charred red peppers on rye bread
Avocado gives you good fats, and in this breakfast it has a double function, says dietitian Azmina Govindji, author of Vegan Savvy: The Expert's Guide to Nutrition on a Plant-based Diet. Vegetables such as red peppers contain beta carotene, which is converted into vitamin A in the body; however, you need some fats in order for your body to do this conversion efficiently – the fats in avocado are the perfect partner.
Homemade breakfast cereal
• Dr Frankie Phillips recommends starting with steel-cut oats or other unrefined wholegrains (spelt, millet, wheatberries)
• Add some mixed chopped nuts – to provide more vitamins, minerals, protein and healthy fat – then some unsweetened dried fruit or fresh fruit to sweeten
• Top with a dollop of natural yoghurt and a sprinkle of mixed seeds