GUEST POST: Whether porridge, buttered toast or boiled eggs were on the menu, breakfast used to be the one meal of the day that everybody ate at home.
Yes, we may have resorted to hurriedly scoffing sandwiches at our desks for lunch or, too exhausted to cook, ordered a takeaway at night, but at least the first meal of the day was home-prepared.
That is no longer true, thanks to the growing popularity of grab-and-go breakfasts supplied by fast-food restaurants and coffee shops.
Dressed up with healthy buzz words, they are luring busy people from traditional home-prepared meals, and plying them with unhealthy amounts of hidden fat, salt and sugar.
Take Pret A Manger. The company emphasises breakfast as the most important meal of the day, yet its menu falls vastly short of ensuring your day gets off to anything but a false start.
Its Bircher Muesli, while sounding virtuous, for example, contains 8.5 tsp of sugar. Alarming when you consider we are meant to consume only 7 tsp in an entire day.
Costa’s healthy-sounding Madagascan Vanilla Yoghurt & Mango Compote contains 5.5 tsp of sugar.
The list goes on: Caffe Nero makes a big noise about how it gets its menu inspiration from Italy, but the benefits of the Mediterranean diet certainly haven’t made it into its breakfasts. A Multiseed and Raisin Muffin contains 8.5 tsp of sugar.
Starbucks has nutrition flags on its pastry and cake ranges, but they show only calories and saturated fat, possibly leading to uninformed choices, especially with sugar.
A chocolate sandwich cookie, for example, contains 9.5 tsp of sugar, and a Lemon Poppyseed Muffin has 10.5 tsp – about the same as a Mars bar.
It’s hardly surprisingly that Starbucks doesn’t brag about those figures.
McDonald’s has been at the forefront of the fast breakfast revolution for years. It introduced Egg McMuffins in its restaurants in 1972.
Nowadays, you can pick up a gut-busting, 565-calorie Double Sausage and Egg McMuffin, containing 34g of fat and 12g of salt, for £2.49.
McDonald’s even has the nerve to market that as ‘the fresh new way to eat breakfast’ in a bid to fool us into thinking that this is actually a healthy alternative to a traditional, home-prepared, grilled bacon sandwich.
The truth is a third of your sugar, and half your saturated fat allowance, have been crammed into a distinctly indulgent few bites.
That is the same amount of saturated fat as in a Big Mac, or three plain hamburgers, which is hard enough to justify at the end of a working day (or in the evening after a few drinks), but is surely indefensible at 8.30am on a weekday.
Convenience is surely a major trigger for this trend, coupled with time constraints. Yet the time required to park, queue, order and await your fast food (a conservative five minutes at least) is more than it takes to boil an egg.
As a nutrition adviser, I am saddened by the fact that breakfast has become the latest (and last) meal to be removed from the dining table.
The truth is a third of your sugar, and half your saturated fat allowance, have been crammed into a distinctly indulgent few bites.
The opportunity to discuss the day ahead with your family has been stolen and gone, too, is the chance to fuel up for the day, providing your body and brain with nutrients that can boost productivity.
What we actually need are good carbohydrates, fibre and protein.
That means oats, wholewheat, nuts, seeds, fresh fruit (not juiced or in a smoothie where the fibre is removed, leaving just a fructose sugar hit), natural yoghurt and eggs.
Precious little of these are to be found in the fast foods now consumed at work and, worse, on the train, the bus or at the wheel.
Coffee retailers now have concessions at most petrol stations and train stations. With the rush hour lasting longer and train journeys beset by delays, is it any wonder that we are now choosing the instant option?
Breakfast cereal sales started slowing down two years ago, triggered by awareness of cereals’ colossal sugar content.
Fast-food chains have been quick to jump on the bandwagon, extending their menus and offering ever-greater variety for your morning consumption.
Increasingly, however, we are being seduced by marketing that makes us believe we are making good choices when the opposite is true.
A breakfast high in sugar has a startling effect on the body, making us sluggish, sleepy and ravenous just a couple of hours later.
Breakfast on the go does not come cheap, either. The average cost of one with a drink is between £5 and £7.50. This amounts to an annual outlay of between £1,300 and £1,950.
If we assume that the same people eating breakfast on the go are also consuming an equally ‘convenient’ lunch, then that expenditure doubles.
Coffee shops, supermarkets and fast-food restaurants have, I believe, a duty to provide us with more nutritionally balanced options – with far clearer labelling.
After all, if you knew that your Very Berry Skinny Muffin from Costa contained more than your daily allowance of sugar, maybe you would be more inclined to set your alarm ten minutes earlier and do yourself some wholemeal toast and a boiled egg.
Feature courtesy of Claire White For The Daily Mail
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