The London Review of Breakfasts

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper." (Francis Bacon)

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

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.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting that the porridge lasted until just after midnight, and the egg sandwich most of the way until 1am. Or did you mean 12.02pm? ;-)

9:02 PM, July 22, 2013  
Anonymous Malcolm Eggs said...

Ah! So that's what's caused the huge surge in Quaker shares (have corrected).

9:57 AM, August 07, 2013  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Listed on BlogShares