Food Theory- FNAF Was Right, Breakfast SUCKS!
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00 out what he has to say, shall we?
00:02 Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the most important meal of the day. Now, like I alluded to in the cold open, today
00:09 we're tossing breakfast onto the proverbial frying pan to see if it can stand the heat. If you aren't up on the latest movie releases,
00:15 you might want to check this one out. This thing has taken box offices by storm.
00:19 It's called Five Nights at Freddy's. Now, the inexplicable
00:22 success of this movie might be coming from the fact that it's based on a wildly successful video game franchise
00:27 that's played and watched by tens of millions of people, or more likely
00:30 it's probably because of the cameo of this alarmingly good-looking waiter. During his nine seconds on screen,
00:36 this guy, probably the next Tom Cruise or something, takes a controversial stance that lunch is in fact the most important meal of the day, not
00:43 breakfast. So, is he right? What actually is the most important meal of the day based on science?
00:48 Well, to get to the bottom of this one, we have to look at everything from food history to human physiology.
00:53 Let me tell you, the truth isn't as simple as some cereal commercials make it sound. In reality,
00:58 this whole thing is steeped in conspiracy,
01:00 fear-mongering, and bacon. Lots and lots of bacon.
01:03 So, in order to decide what the most important meal of the day is, the first thing that I'd like to know is where the phrase
01:08 actually comes from. Was it the brainchild of some marketing team trying to trick your mom into buying Pop-Tarts?
01:13 Is it actually based on some form of science? Who was in fact the first person to actually say that
01:18 breakfast is the most important meal of the day?
01:20 Well, the answer is a couple of random guys coming about a hundred years ago. In a classic case of
01:24 pseudoscientists said something one time and we all believe it, the idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day started with Dr.
01:31 John Harvey Kellogg, the guy who invented cornflakes.
01:34 Yeah, Kellogg, like the cereal brand. Before he came along, breakfast consisted of leftovers from the night before.
01:40 It was mostly seen as exactly what the name suggested, a light meal to start your day, to break your fast from overnight.
01:46 In came Kellogg at the beginning of the 1900s, who really didn't like the diet Americans found themselves eating.
01:52 He was a staunch advocate of a bland food diet to improve health and physical fitness. No spices, no elaborate cooking methods,
01:58 basically no flavor. And honestly, to his credit, Kellogg was way ahead of his time in understanding that the bacteria in your gut
02:05 influences your total health. This was revolutionary at the turn of the 20th century.
02:09 Sadly though, he was also a big fan of very unsavory topics like segregation and eugenics.
02:15 So let's just say that his judgment as a medical professional was, uh, a wee bit flawed.
02:19 He believed that in order to preserve your gut bacteria and be healthy,
02:22 you should eat only extremely bland foods, never drink, never smoke, and also be completely abstinent.
02:28 You might have heard the rumor kicking around that Kellogg invented cornflakes as a way to stop kids from masturbating, and that rumor is
02:34 absolutely true.
02:36 That's- that's why he did it. When food theory creative director Santi was researching this episode,
02:40 no joke, apparently when he was a kid, people told him that cornflakes were originally meant to be put under the mattress so that kids wouldn't
02:46 be tempted to do anything to make them crunch on their bed, if you know what I mean.
02:50 Because someone could hear them and then promptly shame them. That one's apparently not true,
02:54 but the legends around this stuff are unreal.
02:56 Suffice it to say, part of the marketing strategy for these cornflakes was to amp up the importance of a boring breakfast so people would
03:02 be healthy and less sinful. This was the first step in breakfast's popularity snapping, crackling, and popping off.
03:08 Speaking of breakfast snapping and crackling, if you're sick of bacon splattering all over you while you cook in the morning,
03:13 make sure to head on over to TheoryWare.com to check out our new Five Nights at Freddy's products, including the Fazbear Entertainment apron.
03:20 It may not protect you from possessed animatronics,
03:22 but when it comes to keeping you safe from burns, stains, and not looking fashionable in the kitchen,
03:26 this is the only apron you need. Even though the massive multi-million dollar production refuses to let good old Ness sport one of these
03:31 aprons in his pivotal scene, I'm sure I can make a case for it when we inevitably expand his role in the sequel.
03:36 I can see it now. A line of theorists sporting them as we all wait for the premiere of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the return of Ness.
03:43 There's also a lot of cool jacks and t-shirts that we made for this collection as well,
03:46 so mosey on over to TheoryWare.com to place your order and check out the rest of our official FNAF collab.
03:51 But enough about that,
03:52 let's look at the movement that officially locked in breakfast as the most important meal of the day.
03:57 You see, that actually came from Sigmund Freud, or actually Sigmund Freud's nephew.
04:02 Sigmund Freud's nephew was a public relations manager named Edward Bernays,
04:05 and he's the biggest reason that we associate the most important meal of the day with the massive food fests that are served up everywhere from
04:12 Denny's to the Four Seasons. Edward Bernays worked on PR in the 1920s for a company called
04:16 Beachnut, who was trying to find ways of selling more of its bacon and ham products.
04:21 I'm sure you can already see where this one's going. Good old Eddie hatched a plan to make people want to buy bacon by telling
04:26 them that their doctors wanted them to do it. At the time, his PR agency had a doctor on staff for...
04:32 reasons. And Bernays posed a question to him. "Wouldn't people have more energy if they ate more in the morning instead of just cereal and
04:38 coffee?" The doctor, who again was on staff at this PR agency, said "Yeah, people burn calories when they sleep,
04:44 so they would probably benefit from having a little bit more in the morning to help recover some of those lost calories."
04:49 Literally the premise of this whole thing was, "You burn calories while sleeping, and by eating in the morning, you recover some of those calories."
04:56 So then Bernays had this doctor, who remains unnamed in almost every article or book
05:00 he's ever mentioned in, write to 5,000 other physicians basically asking, "Hey,
05:05 do you agree that the body burns calories overnight and that eating a hearty breakfast could potentially recover those calories?" And
05:11 4,500 of them responded with a, "Well, yeah." Because they were basically just asking, "If you burn calories,
05:17 do you put calories back in your body by eating more?" When asked what would make a hearty breakfast, many of the physicians
05:22 referenced bacon and eggs, and from there the story wrote itself. Bernays claimed that a hearty breakfast prominently featuring bacon was medically based.
05:30 It worked like a charm, and lo and behold, today
05:32 70% of bacon is eaten at breakfast, and the meal became so ubiquitous with health and a good day that no one ever stopped to think
05:39 twice. In short, the nephew of Freud slipped this one right past us.
05:43 So where then does that leave us? The idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day isn't and has never been based on
05:49 human physiology or any actual science. The breakfast that we know today is literally hundreds of years of marketing ploys designed to get you,
05:57 me, your parents, and their parents to buy stuff, and it has worked like a charm. But the unanswered question still remains.
06:04 What is the most important meal of the day?
06:06 Oh boy, let me tell you, when you start down the road researching this one, it gets
06:10 complicated in a hurry. Not because of some crazy science, but instead because of the
06:14 terminology. In a bizarre twist, the history of the human race has seen basically every meal called by every name of
06:21 every other meal at some point. Let me just take you on a quick crash course to show you exactly what I mean.
06:26 Breakfast is the compound word for breaking your fast, referring to whatever the first thing you eat is after having not eating or
06:32 fasting all night. So whenever you eat your first meal of the day, that's technically your breakfast,
06:37 which is gonna be important to remember, so hang on to that little bit of info. In the olden, olden days before
06:42 electricity, humankind timed all their activities based on the availability of light. When it's light, we wake up.
06:47 We start doing things. When it's dark, we go to bed. Because of the need to do things during the day, people would wake up,
06:52 get stuff done, then eat their most substantial food in the middle of the day when they could see the food and prepare and cook it,
06:57 and then finish doing their activities and go to sleep with the Sun. There are records of this pattern going all the way back to
07:02 Roman times. You know all those frescoes of Romans eating grapes on a couch? Yeah, that wasn't some late-night
07:07 Bacchanal supper club. That was happening at like 1 in the afternoon in broad daylight. When the Western world transitioned to Christianity, the Catholic Church
07:14 actively discouraged people from eating in the morning before attending morning mass, because eating before attending mass was considered
07:21 gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. This tradition is actually carried over in a lot of Catholic countries to this day, where it's still somewhat
07:27 frowned upon to eat breakfast before going to church on Sundays.
07:29 Okay, so people started off having breakfast as their midday meal. Does that then count as breakfast or lunch then? You can see we already
07:36 have ourselves a problem here.
07:38 Historically, breaking your fast or eating breakfast had nothing to do with eating in the morning, because it made sense to eat your largest meal
07:44 at the middle of the day, known as lunch. Or is it? Because here's a new twist. What we see as lunch today was historically
07:50 known as dinner. Yeah, it gets even more confusing. Before the Industrial Revolution,
07:54 most work was done in
07:55 individually owned shops or farms, where it was customary to take a larger break in the middle of the day to eat at home, just like
08:00 we talked about originating from the Roman days. This home-based meal was usually a large, hot meal that would be your biggest,
08:06 which is why in places like the UK, the midday meal is still often called this. In a lot of places, the midday meal was
08:12 so substantial that it was customary to take a nap,
08:15 which is where we get the common practice of a midday rest. If you've ever spent time in countries like Italy, Spain, or Greece,
08:19 you'll have come across siesta, or reposo, times where workers and shopkeepers close up, eat, and then take themselves a nap. In more rural areas,
08:27 these still absolutely exist and can last upwards of three hours,
08:30 giving people plenty of time to recharge during what we would now consider to be the mid-afternoon slump.
08:35 So why don't we still do this? Well, this main breakfast, dinner, lunch that people have been eating for thousands of years was upended in the
08:42 1800s by a little fad called the Industrial Revolution.
08:45 This thing changed people's normal eating and sleeping patterns all in the name of productivity. Suddenly, people started to have timed and regulated workdays,
08:53 so breakfast became more of a necessity for anyone wanting to make it through the day, or at least make it until they got to
08:58 their mandated lunch break.
09:00 Electricity meant that people were no longer setting their clocks by the sun. Instead,
09:03 they were setting them by the clock. This made the "what the heck do we call this meal" problem worse. People were breaking their fast
09:09 much earlier than before,
09:10 eating a light lunch or dinner during the time of day that they had to eat their heaviest meal, and then coming home and eating
09:15 the newly coined supper. Supper is a funny meal, because it started out as a light snack while you played games or read a book
09:21 before bed, not designed to be heavy or substantial in any way. Over time, the upper class started to have more and more elaborate
09:27 suppers and throw in larger and more involved supper parties for their friends and colleagues, which grew supper into the elaborate circus that we now
09:34 know as a multi-course dinner. This last meal of the day is so important to us here in the West that we don't even recognize how
09:40 recently it was added to the docket of meals. To add insult to injury, the idea of supper was actually popularized by a midnight snack, a
09:47 very specific snack eaten by none other than the Earl of Sandwich every night before his bedtime.
09:53 He would ask his staff to make him his newly invented snack, the sandwich, late, late at night.
09:57 Which means that what we now consider to be the most popular lunch food in the US
10:01 started off as a snack eaten closer to midnight than noon. TL;DR,
10:06 you can't name breakfast or lunch or even dinner as the most important meal of the day because they've all been called by each other's names
10:12 for centuries. Despite all our efforts, we're foiled yet again when it comes to naming a meal
10:17 that's the best because all the names are ultimately meaningless.
10:20 So now we turn to the last bastion of hope to find ourselves the best meal, actual physiological science.
10:26 I promised that it would be in here, but I had to show you why this is literally our only option.
10:30 There are a lot of quote-unquote
10:32 science facts about meals out there and a lot of them are unfortunately not facts at all.
10:36 So let's just debunk a couple of the key ones. First is the question of breakfast being important because it jumpstarts your metabolism.
10:42 We've all heard this, but studies don't really support the claim.
10:44 And this is found in reputable journals like the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition as well as several obesity focused journals. Studies show that people who
10:51 skipped breakfast didn't have any differences in metabolism
10:54 so long as they got the right amount of food later on in the day. And skipping breakfast didn't lead to any
10:59 significant weight gain or loss over time in studies of hundreds of different patients.
11:03 But I hear you saying, "Doesn't breakfast make you more full during the day and thereby help you eat less later on?" Surprise, surprise!
11:09 No. In a meta-analysis, studies found that this breakfast urban legend doesn't hold any water. A study from Harvard Medical School published that those that had
11:17 breakfast actually consumed more calories than those that skipped breakfast. For many, eating breakfast was pretty far apart from lunch,
11:23 so they felt hungry all over again by midday and then again at dinnertime.
11:27 This is sort of a double-edged sword and comes down to the individual, because if you skip breakfast,
11:31 you might feel more hungry later on and thereby overindulge with your other meals, which researchers in the previous studies have also found.
11:38 I also want to heavily couch all of this in the idea that you should always, always be eating enough food for your body,
11:43 all bodies are different, and that all bods are beautiful bods.
11:46 Skipping meals is something that all of us have done at some point or another because of a variety of different reasons,
11:50 but I want to make it very clear that we are reporting on research, not telling
11:54 individuals how they should be eating or not eating. That right there, that could be super dangerous.
11:58 The point is that when you read the headline "skipping breakfast is bad for your health",
12:01 it's not really telling you the whole story, and it ends up just being another misleading soundbite.
12:05 So, what the heck is true then? The established science changes on this topic,
12:10 but right now what's well accepted in nutrition and physiology journals is that your body's circadian rhythm, your natural sleeping and wake cycles,
12:17 matters a lot when it comes to your eating. Your circadian rhythm prepares you to be more efficient at absorbing and digesting foods in the
12:23 first half of the day, and specifically not later on in the day when most of us are currently eating the majority of our caloric intake.
12:29 For most people, both breakfast and lunch fall into the first half of the day, whether you're eating at 8 a.m.
12:34 or 1 p.m., and this has been shown repeatedly to be the better half of the day to focus on when it comes to filling your plate.
12:40 Your late evening meals, whether you're calling them dinner or supper or whatever, are likely hitting your body at a time when it's less able to
12:46 effectively absorb nutrients and is already releasing melatonin and decreasing insulin in preparation for your sleep.
12:52 This chart from the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology gives a very high-level summary of how your body is regulated by your sleep-wake cycle.
12:58 It shows that during the earlier parts of the day, you have better glucose tolerance, better insulin secretion, and the ability to basically use energy efficiently to fuel you up quickly.
13:07 When you're asleep, your body wants to do the maintenance activities, not process a bunch of new food that's floating around in your system.
13:13 At night, your body goes through gluconeogenesis, that process that you learned about in biology where it makes new energy for the next day.
13:19 It's also letting your mitochondria grow and support your cells, sending recovery nutrients to your muscles.
13:23 Basically all the really important stuff that needs to happen if you want to feel like a person instead of a zombie the next day.
13:28 When you don't sleep, you're missing out on all these processes, but when you eat right before going to sleep,
13:33 you also disrupt a lot of these functions because your body has to deal with the very pressing demands of digestion.
13:38 For a specific example that doesn't need a biology degree, take insulin.
13:41 We're all generally aware of insulin and know it's important to regulate your blood sugar.
13:45 In the back half of the day, your insulin decreases because your body expects you to be done eating.
13:50 But what if you're like me and you're mainlining soda and ice cream at 2am to get through writing a script,
13:54 in a clearly hypothetical scenario that has never once happened ever?
13:58 Well, when this happens, your body has to spike your insulin to deal with the onslaught of sugar floating around in your bloodstream.
14:04 Insulin skyrockets, which leads to a huge cascade of other hormones, including the suppression of MCH, or Melanin Concentrating Hormone,
14:11 which then keeps you from falling asleep.
14:13 Eating at night, instead of sending signals to your brain that you're full,
14:16 can also lead to your brain producing more of the hormone orexin, the neurotransmitter that tells your brain that it's hungry.
14:21 So eating at night can disrupt your ability to go to sleep and even lead to you being even hungrier in the long run,
14:27 which is why a lot of people find themselves caught in a snacking chain for hours and hours deep into the evening.
14:32 When then should we be eating?
14:34 What is the most important meal of the day?
14:36 Well, pretty clearly it should be sometime in the first half of the day based on our circadian rhythms.
14:41 Problem is, after all the marketing scams and long work hours and restaurants that serve you 1000 calorie dinners at 9pm,
14:47 it is hard to eat the way that your body was designed to.
14:50 The most important meal of the day, according to our bodies, should be taking place sometime in the sort of middle of the day,
14:55 like between 10am and 2pm.
14:57 It's been called breakfast, it's been called lunch, sometimes it's even called dinner.
15:00 So what you call it's entirely up to you.
15:02 Though for the record, Nesta the waiter was right, because lunch is the meal that we eat in the middle of the day.
15:06 Just saying.
15:07 The problem is that these hours are expected to be prime working hours for most of us.
15:11 I know for me, I have meetings during this block of time practically every day.
15:14 Stopping everything that I'm doing to eat a hot, hearty meal at noon?
15:18 Yeah, it's not a luxury that most people have.
15:20 The reason this topic feels so confusing is that when you follow where the evidence leads,
15:24 it presents a solution that's just not possible for a lot of us to execute.
15:28 That said, this is one of those instances where knowledge is power.
15:30 There are meal plans out there that you can try where you eat half of your daily calories at lunch,
15:35 and then just 20% at dinner.
15:36 Leaving 30% for breakfast if you're keeping track.
15:39 Might be interesting to try shifting your eating around a little bit to see if it makes you feel better,
15:43 sleep better, or just feel more comfortable in your own body.
15:45 I know that after doing all this research for this episode, I'm gonna be trying some of these tactics too.
15:50 Thanks for the tip there, Ness.
15:51 I knew you looked smart.
15:52 But hey, that's just a theory.
15:55 A food theory.
15:57 Bon appétit.
15:58 Hopefully in the first half of the day.
16:00 [Music]