Tired and hungry? How the wrong breakfast will ruin your day | Prof. Benjamin Gardner & Professor Tim Spector

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. The sound of cereal falling into a bowl and the splash of milk pouring on top. For many of us, it's the sound of our childhood and the natural start to our day. We've all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But what if our traditional breakfast has been making us sick? Could our morning habits be setting us up for a day of energy slumps, overeating and brain fog? In this episode, professor Tim Spector shares how the latest science suggests that when we get our first meal right, it sets us up for a better day and more importantly, a longer life. But breakfast is a habit often set up in childhood. It's one that's very hard to change. So today, we're also joined by Benjamin Gardner, a professor in psychology and world leading expert in behavior change to explain how to successfully adopt healthy breakfast habits. He teaches us how to use our morning routines as a springboard to support healthy habits throughout our day. If you've ever wondered how long it takes to create a habit and how to deal with the inevitable missteps along the way, then today you'll learn actionable advice on how to get there from two world leading experts. Ben, thank you for joining me today. Thank you. And Tim, thanks for being here. Great to be here too. So Ben, we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go? I will give it a go. Excellent. And we have some quite strict rules, very hard for professors. You can say yes or no, or you have to a one sentence answer. Okay. I'm gonna start with Tim so you get the hang of it. Tim, can good breakfast habits reduce your long term disease risk? Yes. Ben, does building a new habit take twenty one days? Nope. Tim, can a poor breakfast influence your energy levels for the rest of the day? Definitely. And Ben, what's the biggest myth that you often hear about behaviour change? That it takes a certain amount of time to make or break a habit. That's not true? No. Breakfast is the meal that generally we have the most control over as we're usually at home, But so many of us just eat exactly the same thing every day and probably eating something that some big food company has convinced us is a good choice. So Tim, I mean, first off, is breakfast the most important meal of the day? It depends how you define breakfast, really. Most people think of breakfast as something you eat shortly after waking up. And if that's the definition, it's no longer true. Although in most government health guidelines, it's still there in black and white. …