Tired and hungry? How the wrong breakfast will ruin your day | Prof. Benjamin Gardner & Professor Tim Spector

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
The sound of cereal falling into a bowl, and the splash of milk pouring on top. For many of us, it's the sound of our childhood, and the natural start to our day. We've all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But what if our traditional breakfast has been making us sick? Could our morning habits be setting us up for a day of energy slumps, overeating, and brain fog? In this episode, Professor Tim Spector shares how the latest science suggests that when we get our first meal right, it sets us up for a better day, and more importantly, a longer life. But breakfast is a habit often set up in childhood. It's one that's very hard to change. So today, we're also joined by Benjamin Gardner, a professor in psychology and world-leading expert in behavior change, to explain how to successfully adopt healthy breakfast habits. He teaches us how to use our morning routines as a springboard to support healthy habits throughout our day. If you've ever wondered how long it takes to create a habit, and how to deal with the inevitable missteps along the way, then today you'll learn actionable advice on how to get there from two world-leading experts. Ben, thank you for joining me today.

**Tim Spector** (1:33)
Thank you.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:34)
And Tim, thanks for being here.

**Tim Spector** (1:35)
Great to be here too.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:37)
So Ben, we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go?

**Benjamin Gardner** (1:44)
I will give it a go.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:45)
Excellent. And we have some quite strict rules, very hard for professors. You can say yes or no, or you have to do a one sentence answer.

**Benjamin Gardner** (1:54)
Okay.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:55)
I'm going to start with Tim so you get the hang of it. Tim, can good breakfast habits reduce your long-term disease risk?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:03)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:04)
Ben, does building a new habit take 21 days?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:08)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:09)
Tim, can a poor breakfast influence your energy levels for the rest of the day?

**Tim Spector** (2:15)
Definitely.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:16)
And Ben, what's the biggest myth that you often hear about behaviour change?

**Benjamin Gardner** (2:21)
That it takes a certain amount of time to make or break a habit.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:24)
That's not true?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:25)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:26)
Breakfast is the meal that generally we have the most control over, as we're usually at home. But so many of us just eat exactly the same thing every day. And probably eating something that some big food company has convinced us is a good choice. So Tim, I mean, first off, is breakfast the most important meal of the day?

**Tim Spector** (2:45)
It depends how you define breakfast, really. Most people think of breakfast as something you eat shortly after waking up. And if that's the definition, it's no longer true. Although in most government health guidelines, it's still there in black and white. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It's what our mothers told us and it's what advertisers tell us as well. But if you think of breakfast as the first meal of the day that can be like when I eat it, 11 o'clock, it is still probably the most important one. I found in this new way of thinking about food and how to be healthy, what we've discovered is that the standard breakfast of eating half an hour after waking up is not for everybody. It used to be said that it was really harmful. If you skipped it, your kids would fail at school. You'd be fainting by the time you got to lunch, and that's absolute rubbish. There have been a dozen studies now comparing people who skip their breakfast and just have nothing before lunch or the other way around, and real no negative effects and some benefits. But it's not for everybody, and we've done some studies to actually look at this in people who have delayed their breakfast, and most people are able to delay their breakfast until 11 without any problems actually feel better. Whereas there are some people like yourself, it's the worst thing you could do is to not have your breakfast early on. So it's much more variable and more personalized than we've believed, but coming back to your point, it's still also the time where generally you're more in control of what you're eating. You're generally not at work, you're not out on the road. So in that respect, it does set you up properly, and it also, if you pick the wrong breakfast, can set you up really badly so that you end up in a spiral of glucose, sugar spikes, and highs and lows with energy dips. And this is what I noticed when I changed my diet the most, is I had the classic English breakfast, which I thought was healthy, which was a standard muesli with low-fat milk. I might have a bit of toast, marmalade, have a small bit of orange juice. I'd have that at eight o'clock, and by 11 o'clock, I'd be hungry, I'd be having an energy dip, I'd be looking for some chocolate biscuit to go with my coffee to keep me going. I was in this cycle of highs and lows with major energy dips.