Chef, author, TV personality and clean-living advocate Pete Evans considers the benefits of taking a new approach when it comes to breakfast food.
Ok, this might ruffle some feathers, but I want to ask you all a question: Why do people eat cereal for breakfast? It is one of those things that we don’t even question, because we have been brought up in a society that tells us we must be eating this stuff to be healthy and strong – we regularly see iron men and famous sports stars spruiking it on TV.
We grow these cereal grains – wheat, corn, rice, oats and others – to feed ourselves but we were never actually designed to eat them in any significant way. To make matters worse, once harvested, most are processed to death to remove any nutritional value and then they are mixed with some form of toxic sweetener and sometimes even coloured and mixed with vegetable oil as well. The resulting cereal is then usually topped with milk that has had sugar added and most of the nutrients removed during processing – hardly resembling what the cow was naturally producing for its own young.
On a nutritional level, when you eat cereal grains, they are turned to sugar in your body and if you are eating excess, then guess what it gets stored as? Fat. We have two ways of running our bodies’ metabolic fire, so to speak: We can either be sugar burners, which most of the population are because of their addiction and love affair with processed carbohydrates, or we can be fat burners, where we get most of our caloric intake from quality fats and proteins with the addition of quality fibrous vegetables.
The latter is called a ketogenic approach to eating, and I urge you all to do further reading on the subject. It is how I’ve chosen to live my life for the last three years and it is liberating. I am no longer a slave to hunger as I have eliminated the carb-craving sugar monster, as some like to call it.
For me, grains offer nothing that you cannot get from more nutrient-dense sources such as eggs from pasture-raised chooks, and the fat and protein from animals that have also had a natural diet and of course quality, chemical-free vegetables.
I will leave you with a lasting thought: I usually eat last night’s dinner leftovers for breakfast most days, which will be either a roast, a curry, a soup or a stir-fry. Or, I will whip us up some eggs with bacon, avocado and kale in a matter of 10 minutes. Breakfasting in this way keeps us going well until lunchtime, if not dinner.
