Day: 26 June 2007

Thinking about how we eat our meals the wrong way round, (click to read), I try to follow my own advice, and have good breakfast every day, and cut down, eat less in the evening, but this is difficult when you see wonderful desserts on the menu, chocolate gateau, ice cream, cheese and biscuits.

Yes I know I should eat fruits. But I am a fresh meat man.

Many of my breakfasts are taken in different hotels around the world, and I find it quite interesting to experience the cultures and what is offered in the different countries. Each country have their own traditions of what is to be eaten as the first meal of the day.

In England we would have an English breakfast, consisting of egg, bacon, mushrooms, fried tomatoes, sausage, backed beans, maybe black pudding, fried bread. We would also have a cereal, cornflakes with milk, ending with toast and marmalade or jam, washed down with and English cup of tea or coffee with milk.

                                                        /images/71606-62901/bfast3coffe.JPG”>     /images/71606-62901/bfast1.JPG”> Cooked meat?

Turkey, will serve an egg, scrambled or hard boiled, some form of processed meat in the form of a sausage served in a tomato sauce, slices of cucumber, cheese and more processed meat and olives, black or green. There always seems to be a French loaf and jam. To wash this down, there is the tea, Turkish tea, so strong that you have to water it down with 50% tea and 50% hot water.  

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Otherwise it is a glass of tea and a bread roll sometimes containing a little amount of cheese or black paste, or just a simit bread ring covered with sesseme seeds. Very dry.

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Each culture has its’ own traditions, ways of eating and doing things. It is fun to experience these, but gets very confusing when entering hotel breakfast rooms, working out how and what to eat.

It is said that the first meal of the day, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

I think they are correct, but how many of us go without breakfast? We seem to put the priority of meals on their head, by putting the importance of the best meal as the evening meal.

During a normal night in our sleep, the body shuts down, and the plasticity of the brain, the learning of the brain takes place. The body does not need much fuel, (for the food intake, what we eat is fuel for our body), to operate during sleep. When we wake-up, we need the fuel to kick start our day, to run our body.

What do we do? We have no fuel intake, no breakfast, no boosters to get us going, perhaps just a coffee to give us that high of caffeine, thinking thatn s good. Then at lunch time we may have a sandwich, a light snack, to see us through the afternoon. In the evening we perhaps go out to meet with friends over a meal, perhaps not meeting until 8pm, and sit down to a three or four course meal, a soup or starter, a main meal, and then a dessert, all sold to us by an eager waiter, trying to get our bill (invoice) as high as possible, as the restaurant is there to make money.

The undigested food sits in our stomach waiting to be broken down into the chemicals needed to power our body and brain, which it does whilst we sleep, the very time the chemicals and nutrients are not needed. So we store them in the body, leading to high cholesterol, fats, heart disease, diabetes and indigestion.