Breakfast of Champions

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Now that is a classic morning sound.

The D has to actually come first before any other activity for me.

And now, welcome to Gastropod.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this is the first episode of season two, in which we explore the science and history of breakfast.

The most important meal of the day.

Or is it?

All will be revealed.

But first, we eavesdropped on each other making breakfast.

Now, this is not the best time of day for me, to be honest.

But for you, dear listeners, I will do anything.

Good morning.

Good morning.

You chopping something?

I am chopping the leaves off of the collared stems at the moment.

It'll take me about another 30 seconds to chop them into tiny pieces, and then I will throw them in the pan.

I have some white beans I made, and I just kind of keep in the fridge.

And I had thought about, you know, since we're making breakfast on air, and I'd be a little bit more elaborate, and maybe I'd make an egg to go on top of them.

But the truth is, my usual breakfast is just kind of greens and whatever else I throw in it.

So I think I'm just going to stick with that.

That's right, folks.

You heard correctly.

Cynthia is having collard greens and white beans for breakfast with some hot sauce.

I think that's a little weird, no?

Well,

yeah, I think a lot of listeners would agree with you.

And I certainly didn't grow up eating this.

I think it all changed for me.

On a trip to Thailand in 2006, I was offered kale and salty fish for breakfast.

It was basically greens with these little bits of salty fermented fish.

I just loved it.

And I thought, I am not going back.

I came home and I started making baby bok choy with fish sauce for breakfast.

And I'm not the only one who had a revelation about breakfast while traveling.

Here's listener Rachel Bregan.

There's this one dish in Mexico Mexico called chulequiles, which is

pretty much just like tortilla chips and cheese and some salsa, sort of somehow

either on your eggs or under your eggs.

I can't even quite remember now, but it is so good.

And it's also something where, like, when I came back from Mexico, I was on a

quest to try to find chulequiles in, you know, in the Boston area, which is easier said than done.

All of the places that I've traveled, there's something just very specific to like that location and that culture that just sort of

comes out at breakfast.

What people eat for breakfast around the world is a fascinating topic.

But let me tell you, what's even more intriguing are the different things kids around the world eat for breakfast.

And our friend Malia Wallen recently worked on a story for the New York Times Magazine about exactly that.

And she discovered some crazy things about what toddlers in the rest of the world are eating.

There is some weird stuff in there.

The most shocking thing for me, I think, was the Brazilian two-year-old who was drinking coffee every morning.

What stood out for me was this picture of a Turkish girl and she had this amazing spread of vegetables and cheese and olives and breads.

It just made me hungry to look at.

There was a kid in there from Mali who's eating cornmeal porridge and boiled sweet potato and pumpkin and hibiscus flower juice.

It wasn't all exotic though.

One of the things Malia was surprised about was the popularity of a certain rather delicious chocolate hazelnut spread.

I talked to people in countries all over the world from Pakistan to the Netherlands to Turkey and I was amazed by the global dominance of Nutella.

But Nutella aside there really was some pretty hardcore stuff.

There was this Japanese toddler who had a whole bunch of sort of different little dishes, fish, pickled vegetables, and this slimy, mucusy, fermented soybean thing called natto.

I love the part about how that little kid threw threw up when she first tried natto, but now adores it.

And it made me think about the way toddlers eat here in America.

Things are bland and a little sweet, and there's a perception that kids won't like funky flavors and textures.

We asked Malia if there was any science about how kids learn to love these flavors.

Yeah, so there's a couple different things going on here.

It's kind of there's like a biological force at play and a social force at play.

And the biological one is really interesting, and that is that babies in utero are experiencing flavors through molecules from what their mothers are eating.

The molecules travel through the umbilical cord and the baby experiences them.

Babies actually show preferences for foods they were exposed to in utero which is called prenatal flavor learning.

So there's that.

If we want our kids to have more diverse palates we ourselves, mothers at least, should should have more diverse palates.

And then there's the social part is that research shows that most young omnivores will reject food on the first try.

It's just an innate response, which makes sense.

You know, something might be poisonous, so they will often spit it out or they'll make a funny face.

But there's actually kind of a lot of research on picky eating, and if you expose the child repeatedly to the same food, they kind of learn from both watching adults eat it and also by just repeated exposure that something is safe and they'll learn to eat it.

I thought that was really interesting and I loved the descriptions of all the Korean toddlers on YouTube getting their first bite of kimchi.

Yeah, I mean they're hilarious.

And a lot of them, I mean it's kind of amazing.

You know, you think a lot of parents, you just have this assumption that a baby or a young toddler would need blandness, but that actually turns out not to be true.

And, you know, even spicy foods, obviously you can't give a baby really spicy foods, but these YouTube videos show parents sometimes they'll do a quick wash of kimchi in water so some of the chili comes off, but oftentimes they'll just give them a little piece of kimchi and the baby reacts.

You watch the baby reaction.

They're comical.

And it's just kind of a rite of passage.

It's just something

you're learning to experience the foods of your culture.

And eventually, I mean, it's actually amazing.

Some of these YouTube videos you see, the first reaction, the baby nearly cries after trying kimchi, and then, you know, within a couple minutes, they're reaching for more.

I don't know.

I think kimchi is pretty fantastic for breakfast.

Rice, tofu, some kimchi, delicious.

And you are not actually alone, Cynthia.

Gastropod listener William Lee emailed and told us that he and his family usually have like a smoothie on a workday.

And then on the weekend, they have a more elaborate breakfast.

And he said, they sometimes get to eat a traditional Korean breakfast.

There's rice, brothy soup, some kimchi, vegetables, and maybe a fried egg or two.

William, I think that sounds fantastic.

So while you were making your white beans and collared greens, I was scrambling some eggs to have on avocado toast with a little bit of leftover smoked salmon.

And I am much more normal than you, as it turns out.

As far as that dish goes, yes.

The average American breakfast, according to a 2013 survey, is some or all of the following.

Coffee, tea, fruit juice, cold cereal, hot cereal, milk, bread, eggs, and fruit.

I have no idea why cooked greens aren't on that list.

But really, the list sounds like what breakfast should be, right?

I bet most of our American listeners are thinking, sure, that is what breakfast is.

But it hasn't always been that way.

At all.

I called historian Abigail Carroll to talk about the history of breakfast.

She wrote an excellent book that I highly, highly recommend.

It's called Three Squares, and it's the history of how American meals got to be the way they are.

Listeners, you're going to have to read this book to find out about lunch and dinner.

But let's start with the beginning, breakfast.

So, Abby, if I had joined an American family for breakfast in the 1600s and early 1700s, what would they have been eating?

Well, Americans in the 1600s and early 1700s did not subscribe to the idea of breakfast food that we cherish so strongly today and really I think adhere to pretty religiously.

There was no such thing as breakfast food.

People were eating a lot of leftovers.

They were eating what was on hand.

They were eating, you know, bread, toast, toast and cheese, toast, cheese, and beer.

They might stir up a hasty pudding, which is basically a cornmeal mush.

And people were eating very similar foods as what they would have been eating at other meals, which is to say dinner, which was in the middle of the day, and supper in the evening.

And often snack-like foods.

Breakfast was not a sit-down meal.

Certainly you might sit down, but you weren't sitting down with your family and talking or anything like that.

You were having a pretty spontaneous, spontaneous, ad hoc, often cold collation, really, of often leftovers or what was pretty easy to get.

Over time, the colonists got richer, and by the 18th century, breakfast had seriously scaled up.

And now I'm going joining an American family of the 18th century for breakfast.

What might they give me?

Well, you would have meat and often multiple kinds of meat, and that might vary depending on where you were.

So you might have, you know, beefsteak in Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvania Germans, you might have salmon, Virginia, you might have scrapple if you were in Philadelphia, there was fish along the coast, all sorts of fish and oysters and shellfish.

You know people were eating that for breakfast, eel.

So all sorts of different kinds of meats and often like I said multiple meats on the same table.

In fact, I'll read you a quote of an English traveler by the name of William Blaine who was in a Philadelphia tavern in the 1820s and he describes the breakfast that he encountered there.

He says, besides tea, coffee, eggs, cold ham, beef, and such, like ordinary accomplishments, we also had hot fish, sausages, beef steaks, broiled fowls, fried and stewed oysters, preserved fruits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, of course, that might be a little bit more of a variety than you would see on a typical table, you know, in a household, but people really did eat meat and sometimes more than one kind.

But the evolution of breakfast is interesting because it wasn't as though meat replaced what people were eating for breakfast before.

It was added on.

So there's a kind of snowballing effect, I would say, in terms of the evolution of breakfast.

As the century goes on, though, people start to turn against this mega breakfast and start thinking that it's a little heavy.

Why does that movement occur?

Why do people move away from the mega breakfast?

Well, breakfast changes quite drastically in the mid to late 19th century.

And one of the reasons I love talking about breakfast is because I think that it changes more so than the other meals if you look at breakfast compared to lunch and dinner.

And that change really is thanks to the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution completely changes American lifestyles.

Americans are moving from the country, from an agricultural lifestyle on farms into cities.

They're working in factories, they're working at desks, they're sitting, they're experiencing a more sedentary lifestyle, and they're overall experiencing a national case of indigestion, and they call it dyspepsia.

And magazines and newspapers are just overflowing really with rhetoric about this dyspeptic condition and what to do about it if you have it and how to avoid it if you don't have it.

I am not surprised.

That amount of food sounds completely overwhelming.

I was thinking about Abigail's descriptions of those 18th century breakfasts when I spoke to nutrition scientist PK Newby.

She's here in Boston.

She teaches at Harvard and Boston University and she has a blog to teach the public about healthy eating.

I went over to her apartment to meet with her.

By the way, she also made me breakfast.

Later, I'll tell you what we ate.

But back to these huge, huge meals.

I asked PK her opinion on the large versus small breakfast.

I think that people eat too much in general, including at each meal.

So that does not sound like a very good idea to me at all.

There's a Japanese motto that means that you should basically eat to where your stomach is up to 80% full.

And for many people in the U.S., that's sort of, you can't even understand that.

If you're not a food coma, then what was the use?

You know, no, this is not the way we should be thinking about food.

Nikki, basically, she was saying that the concern today is the obesity epidemic, not the epidemic of dyspepsia.

But the answer is the same, not to eat a tremendously big breakfast.

You know, it's funny.

When I was talking with Abigail, I said exactly the same thing.

This national case of indigestion in the 19th century is basically like the obesity debate of its day.

You have all these magazines filled with diet advice, and you have your Dr.

Oz type sort of quack figures, and you have questions of morality getting swirled into a food and consumption issue.

And out of that, you have a handful of people who actually really managed to transform what we eat for breakfast.

These are people who went on to become household names, like Graham and like Kellogg.

Well, it is really interesting that you point to the fact that a few people have their hands in this pot that we call breakfast.

And the other meals evolved, I think, a little bit more organically than breakfast.

But breakfast, more than the other meals, was really an invented meal, and it was shaped by very specific personalities.

How did breakfast sale get invented?

Well, it got invented, you know, we know very specifically at sanitariums and most specifically at a sanitarium run by a doctor by the name of James Caleb Jackson.

His His sanitarium was in Danville, New York.

FYI, in case you're wondering, a sanitarium in the 18th and 19th century is basically a health spa today, not a mental institution.

People suffering from chronic indigestion would go and stay at them in the hopes of a cure.

And in 1863, at the one run by James Caleb Jackson, breakfast cereal was first invented.

And he experimented with new ways to serve his patients,

graham flour or wheat-based foods.

Basically,

the food was so boring and so monotonous that the people who ran these sanitariums were very concerned about losing their patronage to the sanitarium down the street or in the next county that

was offering, maybe cheating a bit, but offering

something that was more appealing.

And so there was a need for innovation.

And James Cale Jackson basically mixes some whole wheat with water, spreads it on a sheet, bakes it, breaks up the hard mass that is baked, and then rebakes it and calls this granula, which is short for little grain, and starts serving it with milk or water.

And the milk or water was necessary because these grains were so hard that, you know, they were, the critic called them wheat rocks.

You know, they were like rocks.

And they would actually often be soaked overnight, and people were not known to have particularly great teeth during this era.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of decay.

So breakfast cereal cereal served a real purpose there and was initially invented really just for these patients at the sanitariums.

John Harvey Kellogg, you know, invents his own cereal that's actually very similar to what James Caleb Jackson comes up with.

And John Harvey Kellogg has the audacity to actually name his cereal the exact same name, granula, gets sued for it and changes the name to granola, you know, later invents corn flakes and other breakfast cereals.

And, you know, and then of course there's other cereals that are invented around this time.

Charles Post comes up with grape nuts.

But all of these cereals are basically seen as a panacea.

And eventually marketers get their hands on it.

John Harvey Kellogg's brother, Will Keith Kellogg, was an entrepreneur and much less interested in the health of the sanitarian patients than making a buck.

And so

he really is the

machine behind the marketing of Kellogg's.

That's what I was going to ask about, because I mean to my mind, sausage, eggs, and a muffin is infinitely more appetizing than grape nuts.

Yeah, yeah.

How did these new breakfast cereals catch on and become popular?

I mean America's not a country known for its willingness to sacrifice taste and flavor for health.

So how did people convince people to eat these things, these wheat rocks?

Well, I think people were suffering.

And this, you know, actually seemed like something that they could do and was probably, to a certain extent, effective, because there is a big difference between that feast of a meal that I was describing earlier and a bowl of cereal.

But the other factor that we haven't talked about yet is convenience.

And that was actually a motive as well.

In fact, John Harvey Kellogg, I think when he was a medical student living in a tiny apartment with very little in terms of kitchen amenities in New York City, was beginning to dream about

how could one have a healthy, grain-based breakfast without having to cook a lot or spend an hour in front of the stove and then have to clean up afterwards.

And so the breakfast cereal was the answer to that conundrum.

And it was basically an instant breakfast.

So you have a nation that is desperate for

a cure.

You have

sort of a lifestyle that is speeding up this urbanization process and people having to go to work in factories and not having time to make and clean up a big breakfast.

It's like breakfast cereal is really the first big

successful experiment with highly processed food that is marketed pretty heavily that has ended up being sort of the way Americans eat now, but

this was the leading edge of that.

It was and it's very ironic I hadn't thought of it before, but being one of the first highly processed foods, it was also a health food when we don't usually think of processed foods and health foods as being the same, but in this case they were.

I think what made breakfast cereal a health food was as much as what it was not as what it actually was.

Certainly that there were these health benefits to eating graham flour, but graham flour was just this,

you know, much, much better than what people had been eating.

And of course sugar comes into the mix when corn flakes are invented, but they spoil because of the corn oil content in them.

And so John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg are looking for ways to give this new cereal a shelf life.

Sugar is a sin in the eyes of John Harvey Kellogg, who's a Seventh-day Adventist and very strict about the dietary regulations of his faith, but also as a doctor who believes in avoiding certain foods.

But Will Keith Kellogg accidentally discovers or experiments with and finds that sugar actually acts as a preservative when added to the cornflakes.

And they had quite a split over that, a disagreement.

But Will Keith wins and eventually cornflakes become what they are, perhaps thanks in part to the addition of sugar.

That is so fascinating.

Cereal becomes shelf-stable in part because of the addition of sugar.

Shelf-stable and much more popular.

But the amount they added then was nothing compared to the sugary cereals of today.

I asked PK what she thought of cereal.

Her husband eats it every day, the whole grain kind, of course.

Cereal is the standby and the go-to for so many Americans.

And it's a tricky one in some ways, but not so tricky in other.

The fact is, it depends what cereal you're eating.

Anyone who has wandered through the supermarket knows that there is a massive, massive array of hundreds of different cereals, and they differ greatly in their nutrient content.

But you're saying not

cocoa puffs.

Stay away from the sugary cereals.

Those are just pure sugar.

That's no different from

any of your muffins or pancakes or anything like that.

those are just not great choices at all.

You know, that's like a bowl of sugar.

I ate Cocoa Pops as a kid, and there is nothing wrong with me.

Nothing at all.

Okay, whatever, Cynthia.

But isn't it better to eat a sugary cereal than no breakfast at all?

Like, not eating breakfast is the worst, right?

That's not actually the case.

You're probably thinking about this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

I think that idea became popular because there had been these studies that seemed to show that if you wanted to maintain a healthy weight or if you wanted to lose weight, you should definitely eat breakfast.

But that turns out not to be true.

A few years back, I and some colleagues with Dr.

David Dallison down at University of Alabama, Birmingham, we wrote a piece on the myths and presumptions about obesity.

And breakfast consumption was in that list of things that is presumed to be associated with obesity, meaning those who eat breakfast are likely to be less obese or have less weight gain.

However, it was really really based mainly on observational evidence.

And what we mean by observational is those based on observational studies, which are studies that are not randomized, they're not controlled trials.

Like, do those who

eat breakfast, are they more likely to exercise?

That type of thing.

Eating breakfast might be correlated with other healthy lifestyle factors.

So until you do a study design that really isolates eating breakfast as the element under consideration, you can never really be sure that that was the variable that was most important.

There were some new studies that were published this year that called those observations into question.

What did those studies look at?

So the breakfast story is sort of a great story about the progression of science because we have a whole bunch of observational studies.

They suggested that breakfast may be associated, but it was equivocal.

We then had some more stringent study designs performed recently, which are those randomized controlled trials that we were just talking about.

And they found,

there you have it, that breakfast, in fact, was not associated with weight loss.

And they did this by randomizing some people to eating breakfast and some people to just going about their day as normal and some people to skip breakfast.

And after 16 weeks, they found no difference in weight loss among those groups.

In another study, scientists found that people who skipped breakfast seemed to have consumed slightly fewer calories during the day, but they also seemed to have moved slightly less.

But I love breakfast.

I could never skip it.

Me either.

I am not a breakfast skipper.

But the point is, if you want to skip it, go ahead.

It's not a big deal.

And if you need the energy in the morning, eat.

Okay, so grown-ups can choose whether to have breakfast or not.

But what about kids?

I have friends who are teachers who say that breakfast is crucial to whether kids can learn or not.

I asked PK about that too, and the short answer is it's complicated.

So there's a lot of research about

how what we eat impacts cognition and attention.

And a lot of that research has been in kids as it relates to breakfast consumption because it's a natural question.

And furthermore, much of that research and much of that thinking is related to free breakfast programs.

My understanding of some of that research, though, is that it's complex because it very much depends on the child in question.

An interesting review came out showing that it sort of depended on the child's IQ.

It depended on the child's weight status.

It depended on whether that child had eaten breakfast or not eaten breakfast.

It depended on what they ate for breakfast.

It depended on what their activity level was during that day.

Well, we have a word for that in epidemiology, which is that when you have so many different effects, then you start to worry if that effect is real or not, because there's too many conditions under which it changes.

Hmm, not so cut and dried after all.

No, it's not.

But what PK said is pretty simple: is that if you or your kids do eat breakfast, then you should make sure to eat a good breakfast.

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Okay, Cynthia, so scientists may think it's perfectly okay to skip breakfast if you want to.

But did Piquet have any actual science to share on what to eat if you do like breakfast, like me?

She did, but I'll preface it with this.

First, she told me what not to eat and why.

Be warned, she is basically trash-talking some pretty common American breakfasts.

There are sweets like muffins and waffles and pastries and pancakes, and also there's white flour, bagels and white toast.

Those foods, they are quickly metabolized, they lead to a spike in blood sugar, they lead to a spike in insulin, and then you have that dip that people are, most people experience, which is sort of like, I don't want to talk about the word sugar high because I think that's a little bit sensationalized, but the point is, this is a real physiological phenomenon where you get that burst, that quickly metabolize, that spike in

sugar sugar and insulin, and then you quickly dissipate.

And so, then you will feel hungrier sooner, so you're more likely to overeat.

And so, that's not a pattern you want to have in your life because it is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.

It is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and it is definitely a risk factor for weight gain.

We know that a diet that tends to be high in refined grains, and that is all of those sweet stuff we were just talking about, that Americans often choose for breakfast because they're on the run,

is not going to work out well.

I think the standard American breakfast is going to lead to metabolic effects that put you at long-term risk for chronic diseases.

PK also said that juice is the same thing.

Whole fruit is fine, but fruit juice is basically a straight shot of sugar.

Same metabolic reaction.

Well, juice I can live without, but I live in New York City and a bagel is a thing of beauty.

I do love bagels.

And even PK admitted that bagels are in fact delicious.

Muffins too, and sometimes she eats them as a rare treat.

But she said for her, they're not everyday foods.

You know what's interesting, just to dive back into the history of breakfast again.

So muffins and scones and crumb cakes and all of that, they were a status symbol when they first arrived on the American breakfast table.

They were actually sort of a poster child for American progress, according to Abigail.

Well they start showing up in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, basically with the invention of the cook stove, but in combination with a few other things that come on the scene.

First of all, wheat was not successful, at least in New England in the early years of settlement, but you know, with the opening of the Mid-Atlantic and then later the Midwest and the building of the Erie Canal, you start to have really an American breadbasket.

And so wheat and flour are pouring into the cities.

and it's much more available and affordable to households to bake with.

And then you have the invention of a number of chemical leavens.

And so instead of like whisking eggs forever to try to raise something, or you know, a cake or whatever, or you know, yeast, you suddenly had chemical leavens like Solaritis, which is basically just a kind of assault.

It was just a lot less of a labor-intensive way to bake, and it took a lot less time.

And so you start to see a movement from people had been eating griddle cakes, but you start to see now quicks breads on the breakfast table.

They were very genteel.

genteel, and so women who had cookstoves were very interested in showing their gentility by serving muffins.

Poor muffins, once the height of sophistication, and now science wants to banish them from the breakfast table.

A moment of silence for muffins, please.

Can we move on?

Okay.

I need some good news here, though.

What can I have for breakfast?

So here's what PK made for me.

It was a chunky sauce of tomatoes with onions and green and red peppers and some white beans and some spicy charissa paste mixed in.

And then she cooked an egg right on top of it.

Side note, why do you get to eat all the good food in these interviews?

I think you do.

Amazingly enough, that dish happens to be one of my favorite breakfast foods.

She didn't even know that when she started preparing it for me.

It's something I ate all the time at restaurants in Israel.

It's called shakshuka, although it doesn't usually have beans in it.

She added those in for texture and a little more fiber and protein.

This is a meal that starts with vegetables at the star of the plate.

So plants are the star of this breakfast.

We have tomatoes, we have onions, we have red peppers, we have green peppers.

So we're getting all of those rich phytonutrients from our vegetables, our colorful vegetables.

We have white beans in there.

A lot of people don't do beans for breakfast.

Sometimes, right?

Certainly in Mexico, you have huevos and rancheros that can maybe have some beans, but people don't eat enough beans.

And a great source of fiber, great source of protein, great source of minerals.

And by the way, a lot of these foods are filling.

They really help to feel our stomach feel full.

Now, I love eggs.

They're delicious.

You throw an egg on anything, you have that runny yolk, and oh, it's so good.

You can throw an egg on anything, and you have that protein and many, many minerals, especially in the yolk.

Forget about egg white omelets, those days are over.

Unless you have a problem with cholesterol and other issues, most people eating an egg a day is fine or eating an egg a few times a week.

So, breakfast, vegetables, beans, whole grains, maybe eggs, things that fill you up and help you feel full and energized for longer.

Basically kind of sounds like my breakfast.

There is no need to boast, Cynthia.

Mine was not so far off either.

But you know, not everyone has time to cook in the morning.

That's true.

I often eat leftovers from dinner.

Piquet said she often just eats a piece of toast with peanut butter or a piece of toast with some baked beans.

Oh, now that is a classic English delicacy.

Beans on toast.

Perfect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

And that is actually her biggest point.

It's the idea that a healthy breakfast is basically just a healthy meal.

So, the kind of breakfast I made for you today illustrates what we know about nutrition to be good for health, and it has nothing to do with it being breakfast.

You and I joked that if you were originally going to come here for five o'clock, I would have made you the same thing.

I often have this exact thing for dinner.

So, I love breakfast.

I just don't always eat it when most people think about classically breakfast.

But it's the what that I think is the critical thing that we have enough research about that people can really use that to change their behavior and I think the when is very much an individual thing.

For PK, the important thing is what we eat, not when we eat it.

But strangely enough, there is some science about how when you eat makes a difference.

There have been studies showing that restricting the hours that mice ate, eating between say only nine to five, it helped mice lose weight even if the animals consumed the exact same number of calories.

And then there's the timing of that classic American morning beverage, coffee.

I cannot believe we've got this far into breakfast and we haven't talked about coffee yet.

For most Americans, it's the most important part.

But before we get to coffee, we have another breakfast story from listener Enrique Suarez.

It kind of needs a trigger warning if you're fond of small furry creatures.

My worst breakfast experience happened when I was about 12 years old in Venezuela, where I grew up.

It was Easter, and my grandma had invited all of her family to have breakfast at her place.

There were scrambled eggs, arepas, cheese, hot chocolate, and then this bowl of what looked like canned tuna in tomato sauce.

Now, growing up Catholic, I knew we weren't allowed to eat meat during Easter, so the tuna wasn't a surprise.

I put a forkful in my mouth, and after a couple of chews, I realized this tuna tasted a little funky.

I asked my uncle, who was the cook, what he had seasoned the tuna with, because it tasted sort of off.

And his response, that's not tuna, that's capybara.

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with capybaras, they are the largest rodents in the world.

Think huge guinea pigs.

And the Catholic Church allows people from landlocked regions to eat capybara during Easter, given that they have little to no access to fresh fish.

I wasn't a picky eater, but this was way too much for my 12-year-old self.

First, it was way too funky and gamey for my taste.

And secondly, and perhaps worse of all, I love capybaras.

I spent afternoons watching them run around and swim at the zoo and I thought they were really cute.

This was so distressing that I lost completely my appetite for the whole day.

And from that point on, I never ate anything I wouldn't immediately recognize.

I needed to know exactly what I was eating.

I was especially paranoid around religious holidays and breakfast.

Now I'm a vegetarian, so I don't have to worry about it.

But still, every time I see a capybara, I can't help but wonder, how on earth did you end up on my plate?

Father, these like Christmas and swear.

Look, they fool.

Sure, let's go quick.

It's noisy.

Hear it?

Okay, Nikki, you asked about coffee, and I have good news here, too.

PK is a huge coffee fan.

There's been a lot of research that shows that coffee actually is protective when it comes to diseases like type 2 diabetes.

If you don't drink coffee, I think again, maybe you're not going to start.

It's obviously an acquired taste, but it has been shown to be protective because there's so many beneficial polyphenols in coffee, so powerful plant nutrients called phytonutrients, which really, really are helpful for insulin sensitivity.

So I drink it because it's delicious, but it's also helpful for health.

These are side benefits, though.

I mean, what you're drinking it for in the morning is the caffeine.

And here's where the timing of it comes in.

There's a PhD student named Stephen Miller, studying neuroscience.

He wrote an in-depth post about how if you drink coffee first thing in the morning when you wake up, you might not be getting the biggest buzz.

It's based on a field called chronopharmacology.

That's basically the interaction of our biological rhythms and drugs.

I called to ask him about this, and what's funny is that he's at a military university, and he had to run all my questions by someone before he could talk to me, and he wasn't even allowed to tell me what he's researching there for his PhD.

Wow, obviously, some kind of like next-generation coffee super weapon for the U.S.

armed forces.

I need to get my hands on that.

It's actually something to do with seizure disorders and electrical activity in the brain.

Sorry to disappoint you.

But he did tell me some really interesting science about the interaction between cortisol levels and caffeine.

Your cortisol levels, which is you're generally speaking referred to as your stress hormone, vary throughout the day.

But

the amount of cortisol you have is directly related to your attention levels.

You have the largest peak of that early in the morning when the sun is at its highest or when it's rising and you have the most amount of it for the day early in the morning.

So you're already pretty alert.

This assumes a lot of things.

You're getting up at the same time every day.

You're probably a standard like nine to five kind of a person.

But if that's all true and you sleep regularly, you probably don't need coffee right when you wake up.

If you assume those baseline things,

your cortisol levels start to drop off dramatically

after that.

And then I think I said in the article like 9.30 to 11.30 approximately is probably when you're starting to really drop off and feel not as awake or alert anymore in the morning.

And then

I'd say those times times are pretty good to probably be having some caffeine to help you out.

So that's the optimal time.

But what I was also really interested in is sort of what might happen if we're drinking it at the time when our cortisol is already high.

So what if we drank coffee regularly or caffeine regularly at the time when our alertness is already starting to peak?

Something I talked about in the article is just drug tolerance.

And so if you kind of are using a drug when you don't necessarily need it, you're going to be building up a tolerance to it.

Basically, if you're a nine-to-five person and you're getting a normal amount of sleep, then drinking coffee at 8 a.m., it seems to put you at risk for desensitizing yourself to the caffeine.

He says the better time to have your coffee would be at 9:30 a.m.

But I won't tell that to Tim.

He needs his coffee first thing in the morning.

Jeff, so that's my husband.

He's in charge of coffee in our house.

I never make it.

Don't even know how.

I wake up, I have a cup of tea, I eat breakfast, and then an hour, an hour and a half later, just as that initial burst of morning energy is fizzling out and I'm realizing I have a really long day ahead of me, Jeff gets up and makes coffee, which is perfect.

It works in terms of kettle sharing, so I make my tea without interference and then he gets to make his coffee without interference.

And it works in terms of chronobiology because I get a hot, fresh cup of coffee when I most need it.

In fact, I would go as far to say that breakfast staggering is actually the key to our relationship.

Breakfast harmony is certainly an an extremely important part of a relationship.

That's a time people are known to be a little grumpy.

I've learned not to talk to Tim about anything important in the morning until he's had his coffee.

Funnily enough, we actually had this couple.

I'm not sure whether one or both is a gastropod listener, but anyway, they called in to tell us about their breakfast issues, and they are not breakfast compatible.

So breakfast has become

maybe the defining meal of our relationship.

But yeah, I swear by breakfast and insist on eating it every day.

And Bianca here,

basically, yeah, what do you do?

You kind of fight me on it, sort of.

So I really hated breakfast, but then because you've been forcing me to eat breakfast, I actually, you should be happy about this.

I actually really have started to integrate it into my routine.

It still doesn't solve the problem of me forgetting to eat lunch.

Alright, well, I'm going to add that into the win column for sure.

We're making progress.

Basically, where we're at with breakfast is the barometer of the health of our relationship.

Is that fair to say?

Breakfast is the canary in the coal mine?

I don't even know what that means.

All right, Gash Rapide, love you.

We have all sorts of breakfast advice in this episode, but I'm not sure we're really qualified to deal with this kind of breakfast breakdown.

I think there's hope.

If there's one thing we've heard from all the experts we've talked to this episode, it's that people can change their tastes and that breakfast is actually the most malleable meal of all.

That's true.

I mean, think back to those poor Korean babies developing a taste for kimchi.

And PK, she's a coffee fiend, but she used to drink coffee with cream and sugar, and now she's trained herself to drink it and love it, just black.

Right.

And Malia also told us that breakfast is the first meal to change in immigrant households.

I spoke with this professor of food studies at NYU, Krishnandu Ray, and he studied immigrants who come to America, how their kind of their culinary traditions change.

And he says that actually breakfast is the kind of first meal to go Western.

So

immigrants arrive, they'll often convert to an American-style breakfast relatively quickly.

You know, they'll start eating cold cereal, but they'll become more traditional when it comes to dinner.

So oftentimes they'll eat

foods that are even kind of more traditional to their home country.

So it's kind of interesting that breakfast is kind of the

first first meal to fall to kind of industrial Western pressure.

What's so interesting about that is that Abigail also told me that the American breakfast is really, in the end, the ultimate capitalist meal.

Dinner is time for tradition, but breakfast is all business.

So, you know, I think one of the most interesting things about the rise of breakfast, cereal, and toast and that light breakfast is the way that it accommodated American desire to work.

And I think that, you know, work probably shaped our meals more than anything else.

Before I wrote this book,

I thought of food and meals as something that

we valued for their own sake.

We do to a certain extent.

But I really see that what has shaped the meal more than anything is work.

And I think that in our society, work really trumps the meal.

And the meal accommodates work.

And you see that in toast and cereal, which get you out the door and they they give you just enough fuel, but not too much, because if you had too much, you'd be lagging and you wouldn't be very productive or efficient.

So it's a very capitalist kind of meal.

And with that, we have delayed long enough.

Let's finish getting our breakfasts ready.

We are sticking it to the man with a proper breakfast.

I'm so proud.

And hungry.

Okay, I'm assembling.

I got my toast.

Oh, God, I have avocado on my mic now.

Yum.

Greens and hot sauce.

And some beans always, always makes me happy.

Okay, so my eggs are ready.

I'm having this.

Okay, yeah, time to eat.

All right, enjoy.

Huge thanks to Abigail Carroll, author of the excellent book Three Squares.

As well as PK Newby, who made me the world's healthiest and most delicious breakfast.

And Stephen Miller, who wrote about the chronopharmacology of coffee.

And of course, the lovely Malia Wallen, who plays a key role in the gastropod creation story, actually.

She runs the UC Berkeley Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, where we met.

And thank you all for listening.

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