Most mornings we follow the same breakfast routine at home, making our way to the kitchen and, bleary-eyed, pouring some brand name cereal into a bowl. You probably wouldn’t want to think about it before having your morning cup of coffee, but that cereal in your bowl can contain about 18 grams of added sugar. The typical American breakfast tends to be heavy with processed foods such as toaster-pastries, waffles and cereals, all of which are loaded with added sugars. As Americans, are we alone in eating so many sweets in the morning? To find out, we identified typical or traditional breakfasts from nine different countries and compared them to discover how people around the world start their day.
The things we consider breakfast foods — eggs, pork products, coffee, something sweet — tended to hold true across the breakfasts we analyzed. However the proportions of types of nutrition including fats, sugar and protein, differed widely from country to country.
Traditional breakfasts, such as those from Russia and England, don’t often represent what people eat on a day-to-day basis, but rather on a special occasion. If people in England suddenly began to eat a traditional English breakfast every day, one that comes in at a whopping 855 calories with more than 2,000 grams of sodium, the U.K. would most likely be facing a national health crisis. But comparing national dishes allowed us to see that what we eat in the morning is intimately tied in with our family and cultural heritage. For example, a breakfast from the Philippines might feature a few deliciously salty slices of Spam.
But while Spam might tip a breakfast toward the unhealthy end of the spectrum of breakfasts that we looked at, the American breakfast took the cake. The USDA recommends eating less than 10 percent of your calories per day in added sugars. The American breakfast we analyzed came in at 7.46 percent of daily calories, with its sugary cereal, processed waffles and syrup, and orange juice. While the adage “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” has been found to be largely untrue, 80 grams of added sugar in a single meal is definitely not a healthy choice.
