Most replayed moment: How to build a better breakfast | Prof. Ben Gardner & Tim Spector
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Why is breakfast considered the most important meal of the day?
Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. We've all heard the saying, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And while it may sound like a cliche, there is some truth to it. Because for many of us, breakfast is the one meal that we keep the same. Day after day, morning after morning. And this consistency means our breakfast choices have a powerful influence on our long-term health. So today, I'm joined by Professor Tim Spector and behavior expert Professor Ben Gardner to share practical ways to break out of unhealthy routines and build a breakfast habit that will support you every single morning.
Tim, I'd like to get some actionable advice on what we should eat for breakfast to
support our day. What I have is my go-to breakfast, I call my breakfast bowl, which is full fat Greek yogurt. mixed with a milk kefir, which is like a super yogurt. I like to have three fermented foods a day, so that gives me two of them. And then I get some frozen berries from the freezer.
What does Tim Spector recommend as a balanced, fermented‑rich breakfast?
So I would maybe get three different fruits added to that, and mixed nuts, or I'd pick the Zoe Daily Thirty and just put a scoop of that on top. And I'd have that with a black coffee. You know, I definitely wouldn't have any fruit juice or anything else like I used to in the old days. That would be my fairly standard one. I I will vary that and sometimes have a sourdough rye bread, which is high in fibre, and I'd have some avocado on that and I might again put another ferment, whether it's sauerkraut or or whatever, onto that. But I also weekends might have um some eggs and I know So other people like things like peanut butter, which um in this country isn't a common breakfast, but uh actually would be uh much healthier than marmalade or jam or anything else.
And and sometimes I'll have cheese as well. And Tim, why is that better than the sort of cereal and low-fat milk? Well, most people don't respond well to having uh just a massive amount of refined carbohydrates and And sugar in their diet because of this problem of the sugar spike, which has this knock-on effect for the rest of the day, causing lack of energy, mood changes, and hunger. And it also sets you up long term for getting type two diabetes and putting on weight. So moving away from these highly refined breakfasts to real food with real plants, real nuts. Real seeds, things that have a structure in them, means that everything is absorbed much more slowly, much more naturally the the way it was before highly processed foods came on the market.
And, you know, again, picking full fat yogurts rather than low fat yogurts because we want to have the minimum amount of ingredients, and we know that fat fills us up as well. So these meals will actually make sure that you can get through to lunch. without having a a desperate urge for snacks. Everyone's going to have a slightly different version of this. And there are some breakfast cereals you can have, like Wheatabics or things that do have a lot of fiber in them and are relatively low in in processing risk. So I would just advise people to, you know, keep it plain and simple and definitely avoid those those refined sugars. I had lots
of questions from listeners about high protein breakfast cereals, which are clearly being promoted everywhere. Would that be a good thing to switch on to?
Most of them are
rubbish.
And you're just wasting your your money. I know there's a big marketing surge here, knowing that if they put high-end protein on the on the cover of anything at the moment, they'll sell more of it. But there's no scientific evidence that most of us need that extra protein. Generally these are highly processed, risky foods. Whether it's a protein snack bar or it's uh in a cereal. or it's in a drink. Generally, these are high-risk foods that are not going to give you anything like the benefits of a natural food breakfast. So most of us are not deficient in protein. We're deficient in fiber. So we really need to start building that fiber up early on in the day so that we can get our 30 grams of fiber in.
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