ZOE Science & Nutrition - Most replayed moment: How to build a better breakfast | Prof. Ben Gardner & Tim Spector

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

We’ve all heard the saying: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And while it may sound like a cliché, there’s some truth to it. Because for many of us, breakfast is the one meal we keep the same - day after day, morning after morning.  This consistency means our breakfast choices have a powerful influence on our long-term health. So, today I’m joined by Tim Spector and behaviour expert Professor Ben Gardner to share practical ways to break out of unhealthy routines and build a breakfast habit that will support you every single morning. 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra   Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. We've all heard the same. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And while it may sound like a cliche, there is some truth to it. Because for many of us, breakfast is the one meal that we keep the same, day after day, morning after morning. And this consistency means our breakfast choices have a powerful influence on our long-term health. So today, I'm joined by Professor Tim Specter and behaviour expert Professor Ben Gardner, share practical ways to break out of unhealthy routines and build a breakfast habit that will support you every single morning. Tim, I'd like to get some actionable advice on what we should eat for breakfast to support our day. What I have is my go-to breakfast, I call my breakfast bowl, which is full-fat, Greek yogurt, mixed with a me

milk kefir, which is like a super yogurt. I like to have three fermented foods a day, so that gives me two of them. And then I get some frozen berries from the freezer, so I'd maybe get three different fruits added to that and mixed nuts, or I'd pick the Zoe Daily 30 and just put a scoop of that on top. And I'd have that with a black coffee. You know, I definitely wouldn't have any fruit juice or anything else like I used to in the old days. That would be my fairly standard one. I will vary that and sometimes have sourdough rye bread, which is high in fibre, and I'd have some avocado on that, and I might, again, put another ferment, whether it's sauerkraut or whatever, onto that. But I also, weekends might have some eggs, and I know other people like things like

peanut butter, which in this country isn't a common breakfast, but actually would be much healthier than marmalade or jam or anything else. And sometimes I'll have cheese as well. And Tim, why is that better than the sort of cereal and low-fat milk? Well, most people don't respond well to having just a massive amount of refined carbohydrates and sugar in their diet because of this problem with the sugar spike, which has this knock-on effect for the rest of the day, causing lack of energy, mood changes and hunger. and it also sets you up long term for getting type 2 diabetes and putting on weight.

So moving away from these highly refined breakfast to real food with real plants, real nuts, real seeds, things that have a structure in them, means that everything is absorbed much more slowly, much more naturally the way it was before highly processed foods came on the market. And, you know, again, picking full-fat yogurts rather than low-fat yogurts, because we want to have the minimum amount of ingredients, and we know that fat fills us up as well. So these meals will actually make sure that you can get through to lunch

without having a desperate urge for snacks. Everyone's going to have a slightly different version of this, and there are some breakfast cereals you can have, like wheatobics or things that do have a lot of fiber in them and are relatively low in processing risk. So I would just advise people to keep it plain and simple. and definitely avoid that there is refined sugars. I had lots of questions from listeners about high protein breakfast cereals,

which are clearly being promoted everywhere. Would that be a good thing to switch on to? Most of them are rubbish. And you're just wasting your money. I know there's a big marketing surge here knowing that if they put high in protein on the cover of anything at the moment, that they'll sell more of it, but there's no scientific evidence that most of us need that extra protein. Generally, these are highly processed risky foods that the protein is just masking the poor quality of the rest of it, whether it's a protein snack bar or it's in a cereal

or it's in a drink. Generally, these are high-risk foods that are not going to give you anything like the benefits of a natural food breakfast. So most of us are not deficient in protein, we're deficient in fiber. So we really need to start building that fiber up early on in the day so that we can get our 30 grams of fiber in. And we don't need extra protein because we just peered out or it turns to fat. The other thing I had a ton of questions on, because apparently you created a storm on social media is something that's popular here in the UK, a spread called Marmite, which if you're not in the UK, you'll be like, one earth is that. Is Marmite healthy? There is some evidence it is healthy. It contains dead microbes, dead yeast, brewer's yeast,

and there are some studies showing that this can be beneficial for your health. Very early, very small studies, but I think we need to give a different category to fermented foods. And Marmite is actually a fermented food, and they always have some other benefit, and we have to look at that balance very carefully. So I think having something that's really non-sweet is probably good for generally the palettes and for setting your thresholds through the rest of the day as well. So I don't particularly like Marmite myself, but I can see why some people do. And it's probably a healthier option than most of the ones we're having for breakfast at the moment.

That's funny. I grew up with Marmite and peanut butter in a sandwich, which is something that my dad taught me, which I haven't eaten now for a long time. I can see the look on Ben's face. But I love the idea that maybe that was healthy. It might have balanced a lot of the other things I ate. So just to wrap up, Tim, if you were going to create maybe some very simple principles

for thinking about what made a healthy breakfast, what would those principles be? Well, first workout, what's your first meal of a day? The less hungry you are, the more you can actually think about it more logically, and you're not driven by those massive urges. I think we need to go for real foods that aren't highly processed.

That's probably the first thing we should be looking for. So you're going for things that contain the natural amounts of fats. They're not low fat. They don't have additives. They don't have artificial sweeteners in them. And you should be avoiding these highly processed breakfast cereals that are low in fiber and just high in sugars. And Tim, when you talk about sugars, I just want to make sure,

often you're also thinking about foods which are sort of high in these carbs, it gets turned into sugars very fast? Yeah, so what we call refined carbohydrates. These are highly processed foods like your corn flakes or your rice crispy's or your frosties that they claim to have come from some amazing grain, but everything's been stripped away from it so that what you're left is only the tiny middle bit, which is the starchy, sugary bit. All the goodness has been stripped away and it's been repurposed to, again, look like food again.

So it's the fake foods you need to avoid, and that's where we have a lot of our fake foods in this country, is that first breakfast meal, particularly in children. So they're getting really the worst of the deal. And my toast I found was also quite a lot like this. Yeah, so bread is another one. So most of the bread we buy is highly processed, very sugary. It releases the sugar into your bloodstream very quickly. and we should be looking for the high fiber breads. Just to get the fiber content of the bread on the back is really important. And this will narrow down your search a lot. And when you've got that bread, you should be looking to maybe, rather than putting jam or marmalade on it,

you should be looking to put fats on it, whether it's cheese, that's a good fermented food. You can add cream cheese is actually good, or you're putting avocado or eggs, which are high in protein and fats as well. So again, moving away from these refined carbs, having more fats, having more protein, we see this as fending off hunger. So you're less hungry later in the day and you're getting all the good nutrients. And again, you're building good habits because you're thinking I'm going to have a healthy breakfast, therefore sets you up,

as Ben's been saying, for the rest of the day. And avoid things like smoothies and juices, which are just ways to generally get lots of sugar into your system far too quickly. And that will result in two or three hours later you being hungry. So we can avoid all that just by rethinking your breakfast, which is for many people quite a big shock. For me, it was the most important thing I did when I changed my diet. I actually feel like there's a brilliant place to now hand over to Ben. So we've got this idea of this new breakfast you'd like to have.

But Tim's also saying that's whole. hard. It's like a big shock because I've got this habit. Can you help us with practical advice on how we might try and change our habits? So some of the things that we can do to increase the likelihood that we will form a habit, first of all, choose a behavior that you find kind of intrinsically motivating, something that you're going to enjoy doing. If we're talking about breakfast, don't think of something that you know is healthy, but you're not really going to enjoy eating. It has to be something that you're going to want to eat each day. And if we're talking about replacing an old habit,

then I think try and find something that essentially fills the hole that will be left by the old thing that you're replacing. Also, when it comes to the individual, we think that it's probably going to be more likely that people who have a strong need for routine, they're more likely to be able to build these habits. And also when it comes to the situation, I think one of the things that can help us is kind of piggybacking on existing habits that we already have. And this has been called habit stacking by some people, whereby you form a new habit in a situation in which you already have a particular routine. So how might you apply that to breakfast? So practical advice for forming a habit for breakfast. I mean, it might be worthwhile experimenting for a while.

Try and work out what works for you. Which foods do you find pleasant as well as, you know, meet the criteria for being healthy? Once you've determined what those foods are, then what you need to do is make sure that you have enough supply of that food and you actually form a habit for buying that food as part of your regular shop. And then just each time it's breakfast, make sure that you eat that food. And you can make that more likely by, again, making the behaviour accessible, the food options accessible to you. But I think it's really about consistency. So making sure that you do that each day, that's going to form into a habit. Now, I mentioned a study about habit

formation and how long it took. And one other interesting finding from that study was that the odd missed opportunity here and there, you know, the failure to do it on one or two days doesn't really seem to be that detrimental. So don't worry if you don't manage to keep it up every single day. But the key thing that you need to aim for is consistency. So choose a food that you will enjoy eating. Make sure you've got enough supply of it. Make sure you try to eat it each day and be consistent. And if you do that, then over time, you should find that it's starting to become something that's automatic to you. It's starting to become a part of what you do. And you no longer have to think about doing it. It's just become a habit. So let's say we were trying to get you off your banana and

cereal onto something that Tim's selling us. would have a better impact on your blood sugar in the morning. Maybe talk us through how you might approach that. I would see this as kind of, there'd be two periods to this. The first period would involve me experimenting with other foods that are healthier, finding what works for me, finding possibly like a range of food that works for me, and then making sure that I add it to my weekly shop so that I have it accessible to me and possibly stop buying that particular cereal that I eat.

And then that sets up everything in my environment that I need in all. order to start that new habit. And because I have a breakfast routine, as I mentioned, you know, I get downstairs and then I start preparing the same breakfast in the same way each time, it means I can piggyback on that structure and just swap in the healthier breakfast and take out the unhealthy breakfast. So let's say someone is listening to this. They've been completely sold on Tim's pitch about changing your breakfast and Ben, yours, that you've got to create a habit to sort of make this happen. If I ask you to say, like, what are the three steps or the three things they can try and do now, if they want to start to make a change to their breakfast habits, Ben,

what would you tell people to do? First step, experiment, try and find foods that work for you and that are healthy. Secondly, once you've decided on what those foods are, make sure you've got them in plentiful supply. And thirdly, make sure that you consistently eat those foods each morning as part of your breakfast.