The usual day eats its protein backwards. Breakfast is toast or cereal, lunch is a sandwich, and the meat turns up at dinner. When eight adults ate the same amount of protein in a day, once mostly at dinner and once spread evenly, about 30 grams at each meal, their muscles built 25% more protein over 24 hours on the even days. Same food, same total, better use of it. Your muscles are not impressed by a late steak.
That is the case for a proper breakfast. It is not a case for breakfast at any cost. Why Snacking and Small Meals Can Sabotage Your Weight Loss, linked below, has the tests in which people told to eat breakfast took in about 260 calories a day more than people told to skip it. If you are not hungry in the morning, you do not have to eat. If you are, the question is what goes on the plate, and a bowl of something sweet out of a box is the wrong answer.
The usual excuse is time. A real breakfast takes less of it than the toast you were going to burn anyway, as long as some of the work is done the night before. Here are ten quick breakfast ideas that prove it.
A short history of breakfast
The word says what it does: it breaks the fast of the night. It came into written English around the 15th century, and the argument about it started almost at once. In the early 16th century breakfast was being warned against, on the grounds that you should not eat before the last meal was digested. By 1551 Thomas Wingfield was calling it essential, and in 1589 Thomas Cogan wrote that it was unhealthy to miss it. Five hundred years later the same two camps are still at it. Neither side has won, which tells you something.
The breakfast most of us grew up with is younger. Corn flakes were made in 1894 at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, first from wheat, as a breakfast food to counter indigestion. A health food for patients became a company, and the company became the bowl on every kitchen table. Medicine has rarely been so crunchy.
The blandness was the point. John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the sanitarium, followed Ellen G. White and Sylvester Graham, who recommended bland food to keep down excitement, sexual arousal and masturbation. The same place prescribed a vegetarian diet and yogurt enemas. The breakfast bowl began as a cure for desire.
Then the cereal makers found athletes. In 1927 Wheaties paid for the radio broadcasts of a minor-league baseball team in Minneapolis and got a billboard at its ground. Knox Reeves, of a Minneapolis advertising agency, sketched a box on a pad and wrote "Wheaties—The Breakfast of Champions". From 1934 the champions were on the box itself.
Bacon and eggs has a stranger story. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the man his obituary called "the father of public relations", was hired to sell bacon. He found that Americans ate a very light breakfast, coffee, a roll and some orange juice, and he set about changing that. He collected endorsements for a bigger breakfast, had them printed in newspapers across the country, and the sale of bacon went up. Bacon and eggs became the true all-American breakfast.
So the cooked breakfast was sold to us. The twist is that it holds up anyway. 7 Healthier Snack Swaps to Beat the Mid-Day Slump Without Sugar Crashes has the thirty overweight women who ate either eggs or a bagel with the same calories: after the eggs they felt fuller, ate less at lunch, and went on eating less for the next day and a half. The Hidden Science of Sugar Cravings, linked below, has the eggs-and-beef breakfast that cut the evening snacking the cereal breakfast left alone. Bernays was selling bacon. He was right by accident.
The ten
Each of these takes a few minutes on the morning itself, most of them five or less, and the time is in brackets. Most of them take less, because the work happened earlier. As for the 30 grams from the opening: a large egg carries about 6.3 grams of protein, so it is nearly five eggs, or three eggs with a sausage or a few slices of smoked salmon.
1. A batch of boiled eggs (1 minute). Boil six or eight on a free evening, or let a do it without a pan to watch, cool them in cold water, and keep them in the fridge. Hard-cooked eggs, peeled or not, are good for a week. Two eggs, a pinch of salt and you are done, at the table or in the car. If the yolks come out with a green ring, they were boiled a little too long. It is iron sulphide, it barely affects the taste, and it forms faster in older eggs. Cooling them straight away in cold water helps.
If you are not sure how old the eggs are, put one in a bowl of water first. An egg loses water through its shell and draws in air as it ages, so the air pocket at the wide end grows: a fresh egg lies flat on the bottom, an older one tilts up, and an egg that floats is too old to eat.
2. Scotch eggs (1 minute). Make these on a free evening and eat them cold. Wrap each boiled egg in a layer of sausage meat about a finger thick and bake them on a tray until the meat is cooked through and browned. The first recipe under the name, in Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery of 1809, had no breadcrumbs at all; Mrs Beeton offered the crumb as an option in 1861. Leave it off. Fortnum & Mason claims to have invented them in 1738, and one guess traces them to an Indian dish of eggs wrapped in spiced mince. They keep in the fridge for a few days and travel well.
3. Steak and eggs (5 minutes). A thin minute steak needs about a minute a side in a very hot pan. Crack two eggs in beside it while it rests, and they are done by the time you have found a plate. One pan, one plate, and a breakfast that holds you until lunch without a thought about snacks. It also makes you look like you have your life in order.
4. Kippers (4 minutes). A kipper is a whole herring split down the back, gutted, salted and cold-smoked over oak chips, and in Britain and Ireland it is above all a breakfast fish. Lay one skin side up under a hot grill for three or four minutes, or fry it in butter, until the flesh lifts off the bones. Smoked fish of this kind is cooked before it is eaten, grilled, fried or "jugged" in a jug of hot water. Herring is an oily fish, so a kipper brings the same fats as a tin of sardines, with a smell that tells the neighbours what you had.
5. Korean steamed egg (6 minutes). Gyeran-jjim, Korea's steamed egg, is as soft as a custard and needs nothing but eggs, broth and salt. Beat three eggs with about the same volume of broth or water, pour it into a small pot or an earthenware bowl that can sit on the hob, stir once, cover, and leave it on a very low heat until it sets and puffs up. A little chopped spring onion on top is the usual finish. It is the softest breakfast on this list.
Whichever egg breakfast you choose, cook the eggs. The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe has the measurement: the body takes up nearly twice the protein from a cooked egg as from a raw one, 91% against 51%. Raw eggs in a glass belong in boxing films. Cooked, they do more than fill you: Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse (And How to Improve Vision Naturally) has the 24 women who ate eggs on most days for 12 weeks, after which the protective pigment in their macula was denser and their blood cholesterol had not changed.
6. Tinned fish (1 minute). A tin of sardines or mackerel, such as , needs no cooking at all. Eat it straight from the tin with a squeeze of lemon, or mash it with a boiled egg. 10 Practical Strategies to Overcome Barriers to a Healthy Lifestyle has why it is one of the cheapest good proteins in the shop.
7. Bacon and eggs (5 minutes). The one Bernays sold, and the one the British were eating long before him. "Fried ham and eggs" is already in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861, and the fried breakfast spread through the Victorian era. Buy good, thin bacon, lay it in a cold pan and turn the heat up: it crisps in its own fat in about four minutes, and the eggs go into that fat for the last two.
8. Jajecznica na boczku (5 minutes). The Polish breakfast scramble starts with the fat. Cut a few slices of smoked bacon, boczek, or a length of kiełbasa into small pieces and fry them until the fat runs, add a little chopped onion if you like, then pour in three beaten eggs and stir gently over a medium heat until they are just set. Salt, and a handful of chopped chives on top. In Poland it is fried in butter, lard or the fat rendered from salt pork, and the plain version needs nothing but salt.
9. A mug of broth with an egg (3 minutes). Heat a mug of bone broth, homemade or from packets such as , crack an egg into it, and stir as it cooks into soft ribbons. It is warm, and it suits the mornings when a plate of food feels like too much. It is an old idea. In Rome it is stracciatella, from stracciare, to shred: broth with beaten egg drizzled in. A similar soup, zanzarelli, is already in Martino da Como's cookbook of the 15th century, and China has its own, egg flower soup.
10. Japanese rolled omelette (5 minutes). Tamagoyaki is an omelette built in thin layers and rolled up as it cooks, usually in a small rectangular pan, though a round frying pan will do. Beat three eggs with a pinch of salt and a spoonful of broth, the version called dashimaki tamago. Pour a thin layer into the hot, greased pan, roll it to one end when it has nearly set, pour the next layer in underneath, and repeat. Slice it like a small loaf. The usual recipe adds sugar; leave it out. Eggs have not always been on the Japanese table: chicken and eggs were only eaten freely once a ban on them was lifted early in the Edo period, which began in 1603.
Cook it all in animal fat. Whichever breakfast you pick, do not skimp on the fat. A spoonful of lard, beef tallow or ghee in the pan, or the fat the bacon leaves behind, does more than stop the eggs sticking. Fat is the most concentrated fuel food carries: 9 calories in every gram, against 4 for protein or carbohydrate. Two eggs fried in a spoonful of tallow carry far more fuel into the morning than the same two eggs boiled, and none of it comes as sugar. Ghee also takes the heat: it only starts to break down at about 250°C, well above ordinary frying. From Soap Factory to Frying Pan: How Seed Oils Got Here has how the vegetable oil got into the pan in the first place.
And if you are not hungry, wait. The eggs will still be there. The Hidden Science of Sugar Cravings has why mornings are often the least hungry part of the day: when twelve adults lived in a lab for 13 days, their hunger bottomed out in the body's morning and peaked in its evening, whatever they had eaten and whenever they had slept. Why Snacking and Small Meals Can Sabotage Your Weight Loss has the case against eating because the clock says so. When you do eat, make it something from this list, not the last biscuit in the tin.
Two things to leave out
The cereal bowl. Sweetened flakes, granola and instant oats are sugar and starch with a health claim on the front. They send blood sugar up fast and leave you hungry again by mid-morning, which is exactly when the biscuits appear. There is a sunrise on the box for a reason. The boxes aimed at children are worse. Of 161 cereals on American shelves, 46% were marketed to children, and those carried more sugar, salt and calories, and less fibre and protein, than the rest; two in three failed the national nutrition standards for school food, mostly on sugar.
The juice glass. The Hidden Cost of Your Daily Sugary Drink has the numbers: orange juice carries 8.3 grams of sugar in every 100, close to cola's 9.9, without the fibre that slowed the orange down. A smoothie is the same sugar, blended. Drink water.
Six eggs tonight
Breakfast has been argued over for five centuries, sold as medicine, and sold again as bacon. Under all of that, the plain facts are short. A meal of eggs, meat or fish keeps you full, spreads your protein through the day, and takes less time than its reputation. Skip it if you are not hungry. Make it count if you are.
Tonight, boil six eggs and put them in the fridge.
Is breakfast the most important meal? Why Snacking and Small Meals Can Sabotage Your Weight Loss — what the tests found when people were told to eat or skip it, and why fewer, bigger meals beat grazing.
Still reaching for something sweet by mid-morning? The Hidden Science of Sugar Cravings — where the craving comes from, and the first meal that switches it off.
Know someone whose breakfast is a slice of toast eaten in the car? Send them this. Six eggs on a free evening fix most of it.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health or diet, talk to a qualified health professional.
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