Breakfast and energy: an experiment

by Blake Pudding

Hypothesis:

From my vast experience of cereal eating I had noticed that Shreddies seem to keep me full of energy longer than most cereals. But was this really the case? I put the most popular brands of cereals through a rigorous scientific test so as to discern which contains the most energy. 

To liven things up a bit I added some non-cereals to the experiment. Who wants to just eat cereal for breakfast for two weeks?

Method:

At 8.10am every morning I ate breakfast.

At 8.40am I cycled to work from my home in Bethnal Green, East London to Holland Park, West London, a distance of 8.2 miles.

This normally took about 40 minutes. I then settled down to my working day and noted the exact time that I began to feel hungry again.

The control breakfast was 2 slices of brown toast (I opted for the nutty low GI loaf from Percy Ingle on Bethnal Green Road) with butter and marmalade.

Cereals tested: Corn Flakes, Bran Flakes, Weetabix, Shreddies, Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, Sugar puffs, Coco Pops, Shredded Wheat and porridge.

Amount consumed: 50g of each cereal (a variety pack contains 25g of serial, which is not enough for a fully-grown adult) with 200ml of semi-skimmed milk.

On one of the days of the experiment my wife made me a sandwich consisting of two slices of toast as above with 2 fried eggs with a little cheese and some Red Rooster hot sauce. Mmmmmm, that was a good morning!

Apparatus:

Bowl 

Spoon

State-of-the-art circa 1989 14 speed racing bike with flat handlebars for city riding.

Results (in order of efficacy):

Sugar Puffs – 10.32am

Coco Pops – 10.40am

Corn flakes – 10.43am

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes – 10.50am

Bran flakes – 11.06am

Shredded Wheat – 11.10am

Control – 11:20am

Weetabix – 11.21am

Shreddies – 11.38am

Porridge – 12.02pm

Double-fried egg sandwich (see above) – 12.37pm

Conclusions:

Shreddies are indeed good at filling one up. 

It is interesting to note how not very filling the best known brands are: Corn Flakes, Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes etc. After a bowl of one of these I was starving again very soon afterwards.

The best cereals were the stodgier ones such as Weetabix and Shredded Wheat.

The ‘fun’ sugary ones fared particularly badly.

The best cereal was the most traditional, porridge. With a bowl of porridge inside me, I worked without a rumble until well after noon and had a most productive day.

My control breakfast beat all the fun cereals and held its own with the stodgy ones.

The victor, however, by a long way was the least healthy breakfast: double-fried egg sandwich with cheese.

So tests prove that if you want to work without a break, you should have a big greasy sandwich before you leave home.

Poem: Our Love Could Spoil Dinner by Emily Berry

Emily Berry is a veteran LRB contributor (you may know her as Poppy Tartt) and one of the main co-writers of The Breakfast Bible. She is also an Eric Gregory award-winning poet whose work was described by The Guardian as "a host of surreally imagined everyday scenes in which speakers and characters, by turns emotionally, intellectually and physically compromised, perform accepted, expected and imagined roles". Like all good literature, it sometimes mentions breakfast.

We are pleased to share this, the opening poem from her recently-published first collection Dear Boy.

Our Love Could Spoil Dinner

We always breakfast with the biographer.

On day one I showed him my grapefruit spoon;

it has a serrated edge. My father gave him

a Mont Blanc fountain pen as a welcome gift,

but I think he was more impressed by the spoon.

‘It’s almost like a knife!’ he said. The biographer

is a coffee nut and I use this fact to bond with him.

‘Oh, Robusta,’ I say dramatically when I know

he’s listening. ‘You inferior bean.’ When we pass

in the hall I fling my arm back and say things like:

‘Am I strung out or what!’ and ‘Time for another

caffeine fix, methinks!’ I am not allowed coffee

because of my nerves, but the biographer doesn’t

know this. Sometimes we sit up in bed comparing

moans. Mine are always loudest. The biographer’s

are hampered by his boarding-school education

and the British flair for embarrassment. Sometimes

the publishers call. When he gets on the phone,

he sweats; afterwards the right side of his face is damp.

I like to monitor these subtle changes. Last night

my father found us touching legs. ‘Go to your room!’

he shouted. ‘You shabby daughter.’ ‘You worthless

excuse for a story,’ the biographer added. They played

cards to settle a debt. That day my mouth felt wetter

than usual. I asked the biographer to check. He used

his tongue. ‘This may affect the results,’ he said.

Dear Boy is published by Faber. Buy it here.

Special dispatch: Radisson Blu Hotel, Durham

Radisson Blu Hotel
Frankland Lane
City of Durham
DH1 5TA
0191 372 7200

by Fleeter Noggins

At the Radisson Blue Hotel in Durham, the breakfast staff seemed more concerned with whether I was a guest of the hotel than with telling me what options were available.

On day 1 of my stay they asked me to sign a slip. On day 2 they wanted me to go back to my room to fetch the means to pay there and then. I held the waitress's gaze and told her that I was not going to do a runner and she could trust me to sign the same slip as yesterday.

Once the staff had established my guesthood they seemed unwilling to approach our table. I tried to use catching-the-eye skills but it took getting up and standing in the path of one to acquire some coffee, which was served weak and lukewarm. I saw other diners being served lattes but had not been informed that these were on offer. They were succeeding in making me feel I was a bad person. Maybe I need more therapy? But I was not the only guest who was not thoughtfully dealt with. I saw a man in typical Pakistani dress make his way along the buffet. He put beans and sausage on his plate and then strawberry jam, which had been positioned right next to the beans: unless you are familiar with English food you would have no idea than the two items are not normally taken together.

I opted for toast and a pain au chocolat  With the former, I went for what I thought was marmalade but was not recognisable as having a basis in any particular fruit. The latter was cold, stale and probably more than twenty four hours old.

I asked the Pakistani gentleman if he had enjoyed his breakfast and he tactfully replied that it was not what he is used to. He will probably try the Marriott if he ever needs to be in Durham again. When I was there two years ago I cannot recall it being more than marginally better than the Radisson except the coffee was easier to gain access to, but across the road from the Marriott is the Cafe Continental. I'm not sure how it is qualified to call itself ‘continental’ but there I did get a freshly cooked British fry up, a pot of decent tea and two slices here for well under a tenner. It was great. And I was treated like a human being rather than being subjected to customer training's unmeant simperings.

Breakfasts of New York: IHOP, Commack, Long Island

IHOP
2159 Jericho Turnpike
Commack
NY 11725
+1 631 499 7265
www.ihop.com

by Malcolm Eggs

I finished reading The Great Gatsby just in time to look out of a plane window and see Long Island, to which I was headed, from above: a surprisingly thin sausage of green, brown and sandy yellow surrounded by flawless blue sea. Somewhere down there was the town of Great Neck, F. Scott Fitzgerald's home for a couple of years in the 1920s and his model for the fictional town of West Egg, where, not long before returning to the Midwest, Nick calls out a final "goodbye" to his friend followed by those immortal words: "I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby". (Like most worthwhile novels, The Great Gatsby is ultimately about breakfast).

We landed at JFK and drove out to Commack on the North Shore. During the next week or so I had reason to visit the following: a friendly pizza parlour, a hair salon with a fine selection of New York magazines, a liquor store that sold gift bottles presented in pink replica shoes, the office (in Great Neck) of a commercial realty company for which the door was broken and so had to be entered via a side door, a beach with a boardwalk, an old town hall, the foyer of a medical centre, a drive-in Dunkin' Donuts, a vet. Long Island is not a place where anyone walks anywhere, so most of these locations were in malls, either of the cluster-with-parking variety known as a 'strip mall' or of the large indoor kind (heartbreakingly the Walt Whitman Mall did not have "I Contain Multitudes" engraved above the entrance).

As a Londoner I tend to pair the word 'mall' with 'soulless', but the people in these outlets were friendlier and more anxious about my well-being than on any South East English high street. A perfect example of this solicitude occurred at the Commack branch of the International House of Pancakes. Sure, the restaurant's interior – a neat grid of banquette seating, windowed partitions, walls with abstract canvas prints on them depicting coffee, strawberries etc – was almost identical to the transitional places you find at the side of any British 'A' road. But this impression vanished the moment that our waitress, Joni, came over and enquired as to our thoughts on several matters (her daughter's college choices; the egg style I would prefer in my Pick-A-Pancake Combo) as if we were two of her oldest friends.

When my breakfast came it was divided between two plates. The one on the right held a pair of large, fluffy buttermilk pancakes topped with a nob of half-melted butter, and to accompany them a selection of their famous on-table flavoured syrups. The one on the left supported two rashers of crisp bacon, a hash brown and an immaculate pair of over-easy eggs. It was not the largest breakfast I have eaten but the stereo nature of its presentation made it one of the only honest breakfasts I have ever known. It showed how either plate of food was perfectly ample in its own right.

That night, back on the plane, I looked out of the window once more and watched the lights of the North Shore scroll down below us, followed by the pure darkness that signified the sea's current, then the green glow of Connecticut. Minute by minute, my IHOP breakfast receded before me --

"Goodbye," I whispered. "I enjoyed my Pick-A-Pancake Combo, Joni."