Your Nostalgic Breakfast Doesn't Have to Give You Heart Disease

The danger of the Standard American Diet lies more within processing than the food itself. Alarming amounts of glyphosate, oxidized polyunsaturated fat, growth hormones, and other toxins have made their way into our food system as Big Agriculture has lined its pockets at the sake of our health. We can point our finger at every macronutrient, but ultimately it is more the method than the meat that is causing such an epidemic of metabolic disease.

A breakfast of bacon, eggs, pancakes, and coffee can be relatively nutritious if you use high-quality ingredients and know how to use them. Here’s how to turn that metabolic nightmare into something balanced:

1) Eat your protein first. Whenever I make pancakes, I scramble a few pastured eggs for my mom and I to help curb the anticipated blood sugar spike. Additionally, topping your pancakes with some sort of protein like cottage cheese or whipped ricotta is a delicious way to further reduce the glycemic impact of your breakfast.

2) Choose pastured bacon (and eggs, and butter). Of the supermarket meats, grain-fed pork is the greatest offender when it comes to omega 6:3 ratio — averaging about 24:1. It’s hard to source, but try to opt for the most omnivorous pork you can find. Don't let the greenwashed marketing fool you -- "vegetarian diet" may sound healthy, but it means the pigs are eating corn, soy, wheat, and other shit like canola meal. Even "free-range" is a clever one that only means the animals have optional access to the outdoors at some point in their life. Truly pastured pork is hard to find because feeding grains to pigs is so much easier than raising them on a species-appropriate diet. This takes a bit of research, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. As often as we can, we get our bacon from our organic farmer who has six-generations organic pastured pork.

3) Opt for whole grain carbs as opposed to refined flours. Making your pancakes with whole wheat einkorn flour as I did in this recipe, will slow down the blood sugar spike and help protect your liver from some of the sugar in your meal because of the fiber. Einkorn is also the only non-hybridized form of wheat, meaning it's low in gluten and much easier to digest than conventional wheat, even for people with non-celiac gluten sensitivities.

4) Save your carb-heavy breakfast for a gym day. If you’re into lifting heavy, you’re burning through a lot of glycogen (metabolized glucose) that is stored in your muscles, more so than when you do cardio, so refueling with some good old fashioned carbs won’t do you any harm. Of course, we should never view good food as a “reward” for exercise (I haven’t gone to the gym all week and I ate a stack of pancakes with butter and maple syrup this morning without second-guessing it), but it’s good to know ways to offset a metabolic insult if it’s something by which you are concerned.

5) Don’t drown those pancakes. 1 tablespoon of maple syrup packs a 12 gram punch of sucrose. No wonder you feel like shit after going to IHOP. Also, I feel like I should have to mention this, but put away the Aunt Jemima and go for pure maple syrup. High-fructose corn syrup is never part of a balanced breakfast. Just use less of the syrup, and the price difference won’t matter so much.

6) If you’re eating breakfast within 90 minutes of waking, save the coffee for a little later. Within the first 90 minutes of waking, a sleepiness chemical called adenosine is still present in your brain. Drinking caffeine within this window will not clear the adenosine but it will instead suppress it. Thus, when the caffeine wears off, the adenosine will come flooding back, giving you that afternoon crash which compels you to drink more coffee. Drinking coffee in the afternoon is never a good idea, since coffee has a 12 hour quarter-life. This means that 25% of the caffeine in your 3 PM cup of coffee will still be active in your system at 3 AM. Even if you insist that you can get to sleep having had that caffeine, the vital processes of recovery that take place while you sleep will almost certainly be affected.

7) ENJOY YOUR MEAL. The gut-brain connection is so incredibly strong. If you're feeling guilty with every bite, you are sending direct signals to your digestive system that you should not be eating this food, and your gut is going to react with greater inflammation. Passing delicious, homemade food around a table with people you love, eating slowly, mindfully, and with gratitude, is a sorely overlooked aspect of "healthy" eating habits.

Bottom line: Living well in the modern world is about slowing down. Indulgence requires effort. If you're living a busy metropolitan life, odds are you can't always be eating like this. So when you can, make it special, make it informed, and do it well.