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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

I've always hated American breakfast. My family often traveled when I was a child, which meant many Mcdonald's and Ihop breakfasts. The insane greasiness, saltiness, and sweetness of it all made me sick. To this day, I still can't eat any sort of typical breakfast food without feeling nauseous (which I suppose could be due in part to the conditioning of eating and then hopping back into a hot, smelly car for a 12 hour ride)

Breakfast for me has always been a sandwich with veggies or other typical lunch food, just a smaller portion. The whole "breakfast all day" campaigns more and more restaurants push kind of bothers me since there's no "lunch all day" movement anywhere. If you want a good sandwich or spaghetti at 9 AM in the US, good luck.

I'm living in Japan now, and the typical breakfast offered at hotels here is some meat, veggies, rice, and bread. Far more balanced and I don't feel like shit all day.

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I grew up in central Europe and we traditionally ate open-faced sandwiches of artisan bread or bread rolls. You'd top it with some margarine or cream cheese, salami and cold-cuts, thin-sliced cucumbers or radishes, or serve fresh bell peppers on the side. In the US, Subway's deli sandwiches come close, albeit I've found them much heavier, in both the amount of bread, and the sheer quantity of meat.

I too wish that more fast food restaurants served lunch alongside breakfast, instead of exclusively breakfast in the mornings.

Traditionally, you top it with butter, not margarine.

Turkish and German breakfasts are pretty awesome. (See http://theheureka.com/how-to-be-german-part-1 for an outsiders comment on German breakfast.)

French breakfast is: typically a black coffee and a cigarette. (Add a croissant, if you want to pig out.)

Viennese breakfast: 1 bread with butter, 1 egg, 1 orange juice + 1 coffee.

Breakfast of champions.

This reminds me of Paris. I'd drink at the local bar until the sun was rising, and have a croque-monsieur before walking back to the apartment for a brief sleep.

Now THAT sounds like the life!

> I too wish that more fast food restaurants served lunch alongside breakfast,

Most fast food restaurants serve their normal lunch/dinner menu all day, with restricted breakfast hours. Some also have breakfast all day, but this is notable. (Some don't even have a breakfast menu at all.)

The restaurants that have all day breakfast but not all-day lunch/dinner menus tend to be (usually, chain) sit-down restaurants, not fast food (or even fast-casual) restaurants.

McDonald's does not serve lunch before 11 or 10:30. The rationale used to be that eggs and burgers need different temps on their grill, but now that they serve all-day breakfast I'm not sure what they do. Regardless, mornings are still breakfast-only.

Burger King does actually serve lunch at all hours.

Wendy's doesn't open until 10, and doesn't have a breakfast menu.

Taco Bell does has a separate breakfast menu. Most of their stores now open at 7, and they start serving lunch items at 9. They stop serving breakfast between 9 and 10.

I wish there were places in the States that made those little sandwiches. Was in Berlin recently, and every corner bakery makes them. Delicious, and super cheap.

> I wish there were places in the States that made those little sandwiches.

Your home? I've found that they can make whatever I want...

EDIT: This wasn't a cuckold joke- just a remark that you can to a large degree command your diet

Non-native speaker here. Why could this be understood as a cuckold joke? (My dictionary says this about cuckold: "The husband of an adulteress, often regarded as an object of derision.")

Because "Your home? I've found that they can make whatever I want..." suggests that _qhtn is in the habit of getting breakfast at douche's home (and can get "anything I want"!), and that douche doesn't know this.

Haha, I doubt you're giving me horns

Of course when you make it yourself you can do whatever you like (although you lose the economies of scale).

Trying to get something on the go in this area pretty much means you're reduced to Dunkin Donuts, Mickey D's, or whatever paltry offerings the gas station Quik-e-mart carries, though.

> Haha, I doubt you're giving me horns

Sorry- a bit sauced. I wasn't!

You can get Bánh mì in many places in the US which sound similar.

Interesting; that does look like a certain type of sandwich popular in the EU. Where does the name come from?

I'd personally be looking for something like this;

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5vJPM91yqH4/UYzAqHKG0GI/AAAAAAAACM...

and that's not that easy to find abroad. Bad cheese or bad bread but usually both unfortunately.

It's Vietnamese.

For what you pictured, just buy some nice cheese and bread and make them and stuff them in a ziploc bag or tupperware.

That bread looks a bit too soft to satisfy a true Central European.

Schnitzelbrötchen is also good.

Yes, it's Dutch bread, which is much softer than German bread.

Bagel shops? You will have to choose a shop that cooks the bagels with the desired density. The bagel shop I go to will put whatever combination of eggs, bacon, cold cuts, cream cheese, vegetables, and avocado I ask for.

Bagels are very far removed from the sort of thing you would get in a typical bakery or sandwich shop here. So much that I could eat a granary sandwich from my local bakery any time, no matter what I ate before, while I can eat a bagel if i'm very hungry and everything else is closed. I tried as my wife loves them but they are not related IMHO besides that they are considered 'bread'.

Maybe something like this? Opened not long ago in Manhattan: Duran Sandwiches 62 Madison Ave Flatiron New York, NY 10016 (212) 576-1000

http://www.yelp.com/biz/duran-sandwiches-new-york?utm_source...

I don't think most Americans would consider McDonalds or IHOP typical breakfast food. I've lived in the US for 10+ years and only been to IHOP and Denny's 3 or 4 times combined, and only go to McDonalds for breakfast when I absolutely can't take the time to eat at home.

Eh, mildly disagree.

While they might not consider that they need to go to McDonalds or IHOP, ask what people think of for breakfast and for sure they'll say "cereal, pancakes, waffles, donuts, muffins, scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, sweetened oatmeal, etc.", which certainly are all central to the McDonalds/iHop menu. While it's not exclusive to the sweets the article discusses, there are a lot of sweet things involved, and for quite a few, drowning the product in syrup or honey or sugar is pretty common, if the product itself isn't already. Heck, most people I know add sugar to the already sweetened instant oatmeal they prepare.

It was a bit different when I moved abroad and breakfast instead was just as others in the topic are describing it - an open-face sandwich with a small bit of butter, vegetables, and meat of some accord, usually with a coffee and maybe some cheese. I first was shown it by my partner, who I thought was just too tired in the morning to bother with anything else, but soon learned it's what she grew up with.

Just to be clear, there is a difference between the commercial, industrialized restaurant breakfast offerings vs. what people traditionally eat in their homes.

I grew up in the rural south, and our traditional breakfast fell into seasonal categories. In the colder months, we'd eat 2 eggs, a small helping of buttered grits, and bacon.

Warmer months or autumn depended on what was available, but often times we'd eat fresh shrimp or "trash fish" (stuff we'd caught like spot, croaker, trout, flounder) fried up with grits.

The grits were always only buttered, never sweetened. Never pancakes or any starchy, sugary items. Older folks knew these things were energy killers, and ironically the families I knew that ate tons of starches were the ones whose parents had bought into the whole "fat kills you, eggs are bad" mantra pushed by the government. I find it extremely ironic that these families were eating less healthy than the "redneck" families they assumed were killing themselves.

No older American who grew up doing farm work thinks the IHOP breakfast is remotely healthy.

To some degree yes, but truthfully, I don't think the "IHOP Breakfast" for lack of a better term is unique to non-farmers. My grandparents were farmers, their neighbors are farmers, their parents were farmers, and they grew up on short-stacks, sausage, oatmeal, the works.

I never suggested that the IHOP breakfast is the only breakfast Americans eat, but I do posit if you grab a person on the street and ask them what is "breakfast food", you'll hear the IHOP breakfast in some way

IHOP and McDonald's is not a typical every day American breakfast. Talk about exaggerating cliches about Americans.

Cereal is the #1 breakfast food in the US, served at home.

Cereal, bacon, pancakes, waffles, french toast, eggs, toast, yogurt, sausage - most of those are more likely on a typical day for American adults than going to IHOP or McDonald's. Teenagers would include poptarts and the equivalent (which are obviously candy). The US is a massive consumer of eggs, bacon and sausage for breakfast, the article pretends that hardly exists.

> Cereal is the #1 breakfast food in the US, served at home.

And if you look at the added sugar content of most cereals, I'm sure the main point of the article still stands.

Cereal is garbage. My former job was working with retail sales data for numerous clients, including the household names that run the two largest cereal companies in the nation, and I can assure you of this:

They are having HUGE year over year declines in cereal sales. People increasingly know it's shit, and the sales numbers show it.

I had to Google "poptarts", which combined with pancakes and waffles I'd say supports the article fairly well.

Yoghurt and cereal are actually mentioned in the article, for the average type bought being not much better than anything else.

Eggs, bacon, and sausage are fine - but still not a great choice for every day.

What's wrong with eggs, bacon and sausage?

(As long as you get some veggies in over the rest of your day, have as much grease and salt as you want.)

I'm just going to quote myself, but add some emphasis.

> Eggs, bacon, and sausage are fine - but still not a great choice for every day.

You can eat it every day, no problem. Just also add some veggies for the other meals.

And also drastically reduce the calorie count and fat content.

Of course you "can" - just not _healthily_ without significant break from norms for other meals.

What wrong with fat? There's plenty of people (eg traditional eskimo diet, all the modern keto-fans) eating lots of fat and doing quite well out of it.

From my brief experience in America, they manage to put sugar into this as well.

I personally think there is a lot wrong with most eggs, bacon and sausages but let's not go into that.

Does it give you energy in the morning though? I notice that if I eat that I don't really feel all too energetic while if I eat high fiber and light (as in no fat or carbs) I usually don't even feel like lunch. Might be personal; people I know have that as well but that's anecdotal so i'm asking :) I don't know too many people who would eat eggs, bacon and sausage for breakfast often or at all.

Why not go into it? It's exactly the question you're responding to. I'm not trying to flame you, I'd like to understand what the drawbacks of such a diet are.

Because my reasons are not health but animal suffering and that is offtopic...

As a carnivore, I would still urge you to speak your mind.

You may not necessarily convince me to give up meat, but if you are gentle in your approach, you may convince me to be careful about the way my various food-animals are treated.

I personally eat only meat from which I know where it comes from. Which means I do not eat a lot of meat or eggs or milk, but when I (we) do, it will be from animals who had a good life. Like my chickens and my neighbors goats and sheep. Even if that is not feasible for you, most of us on HN do not need to eat animals who were packed in tight trucks, fed crap and otherwise tortured until they die in massive amounts. If you pay more and pay attention you will not only have better quality (I can taste the difference anyway), but also you can look your pets in the eye instead of being a hypocrit. I really do not miss meat and will eat it if I incidentally find it and I have chickens for eggs myself. They have names and they will live to be very old in my garden. I never try to convert anyway: I believe that most people have this when they watch a video of a meat factory but just turn their heads. Sad but I am sure I cannot change it besides give nice alternatives. Which are there for a bit more money and some care.

Ethical concerns about a meat-centered diet aside, I can tell you this: A bacon and eggs breakfast (with no carbs) is for many, many people a very energetic breakfast. It's actually very popular in the MMA and Crossfit communities.

My personal experience with it is lots of energy and a long-lasting satiety that allows me to easily skip lunch.

Yogurt for breakfast is great. Just buy plain yogurt and put your own fruit in if you want fruit. I recommend banana slices and microwaved frozen berries, and maybe some chopped nuts. Or if you want it sweetened, stir in a teaspoon or two of jam (that will still be only a fraction of the sugar content of a pre-packaged “fruit on the bottom” yoghurt).

"microwaved frozen berries" - gawd, this gives me shivers. I hope the rest of the world never catches up with this American invention.

Huh? Have you ever eaten a cherry pie? Apple sauce? Pineapple on a pizza? Strawberry jam on some toast? Quince paste? Canned peaches? Dried mango slices? Shredded coconut? Any other kind of food made from processed or preserved fruit? Ever drunk fruit juice, or a smoothie? (I have never before heard of someone who only eats fresh fruit and refuses any other form.)

It’s really no different here. We’re talking about, basically, heated fruit sauce mixed into yogurt as a fast and easy breakfast. This isn’t a gourmet restaurant offering.

Frozen berries are a technological improvement on jam/preserves which dramatically reduces the amount of sugar you need for long-term storage, but requires some energy use for refrigeration. If you plan to heat them, mash them up, and stir them into yogurt, they’re pretty much interchangeable with fresh berries, but are cheaper, keep for months, and can be eaten in any season.

Or is it the microwave you are opposed to? If you prefer, feel free to heat the berries in a saucepan or bake them or whatever. I find a microwave to be a lot faster and more convenient for pretty much identical results, but suit yourself..

Obviously fresh berries are much better and I'd never eat them by themselves, but in yogurt they're reasonable. They taste better than out-of-season "fresh" berries shipped thousands of miles, and the disastrously poor texture isn't too noticeable when they're mixed with other things.

What invention? Freezing berries so they can be stored? Newsflash - the whole world does this.

No, the normal world eats fresh berries. Freezing them is cruel enough, but then microwaving that seems like the worst thing you can possibly do to a berry. I'm just curious, what precisely do you think you're eating after that? Cause it's sure not berries.

But then again, may be that's natural in a nation that has only ever tasted plastic tomatoes.

Agreed. But they are available fresh in the grocery store in the US. I don't buy them at all. Because the 'fresh' ones available around here are beautiful perfectly-formed bitter, green-tasting junk. Suitable for interior decorating but certainly not for eating. I grew up with berries growing wild in our windbreak. They were marvelous. Astonishingly tasty. Nothing in the store even resembles that.

Many people(including my brother and sister) spread butter on their already frosted, jelly stuffed pastry. In fact there is a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlsFgDjyePc

I've 1 egg (80 calories) and 1 sausage (85 calories) for breakfast, every day.

The issue with eggs as an everyday breakfast is cholesterol, not everything in your diet is about measuring calories. A single egg provides 60% of the recommended daily intake which means you have to be extra careful with the rest of your diet if you don't want to increase your risks of heart disease. Sausage can also have a decent amount of cholesterol, although not as high as eggs.

By introducing both of these as your daily breakfast, you also limit the choices of food you can have for lunch and dinner. Sauces like mayonnaise have eggs, you probably shouldn't eat the occasional omelette, which is a tasty, occasional way of enjoying eggs (I particularly love them with ceps or asparagus), chinese fried rice, baked goods, tortilla, desserts like crepes, the list goes on. None of these are foods that should be eaten on a daily basis, but even less so if you introduced foods high in cholesterol right into your breakfast.

As tallanvor notes, cholesterol-egg connection is pretty weak. Upwards of 80% of your cholesterol is manufactured by your body. Since Timothy Ferris boosted the slow-carb diet, there's been a huge increase in the sample set for 'regularly eating eggs for breakfast' - with no negatives (that I've seen reported, at least). Plus there's the question of whether cholesterol is really a good indicator for heart disease - last I read on this stuff (Ben Goldacre's work) I got the impression there's some correlation, but no causation. And not in a weaselly kind of way, but in a we shouldn't be so focussed on cholesterol figures way.

Personal data point - 3 eggs almost every breakfast, with some sliced meat or avocado - for about 6 years, with no adverse affects. And with no concern about 'extra' eggs in lunches and dinners (fritata, chachouka, tortilla, quiche, etc).

All the latest studies seem to show that dietary cholesterol actually has little to no effect on the cholesterol in your blood.

All those studies are as shady as the studies that used to promote cigarettes as healthy. There is enough evidence out there to the contrary, including recent studies : http://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/S0021-9150(12...

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/25/6/589.abstract

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199112123252405#t=a...

The current rehabilitation of cholesterol is about politics : http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015-08-24-Ho... http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/102/2/235.extract

http://time.com/4225819/eggs-nutrition-egg-yolk/ ( 2016 )

Dietary cholesterol has been thoroughly debunked as a cause of heart disease. Starchy,sugary diets and the elevated triglyceride levels they lead to are much stronger in their link, resulting in a very accurate indicator of heart-disease risk, the HDL/Triglyceride ratio.

Eggs are loaded with HDL in addition to LDL, so they actually boost the top number. However, drinking soda or eating sugary pancakes in the same day will radically increase the bottom number.

I became keenly interested in the science on cholesterol and diet ten years ago, because my father, who has been a vegan since the mid 90's, had his first heart attack. He's subsequently had more. He consumes zero animal products, and we have no heart disease in our family history.

Edit:

Your food politics doc you linked to is just AWFUL. It makes a point about industry funding of cholesterol research since the 1990's, but ignores the immense funding and lobbying by the agricultural commodities producers (General Mills, for example) to push the original lipid hypothesis science that spurred "eggs kill you" thinking in the 1970s. I love how they use this basic correlation (increased funding and cholesterol being vindicated) to conclude causation. That's the flawed thinking that led to the bullshit nutritional standards we have today.

The studies saying eggs were bad for were funded by the cereal industry...

Even if this is true, that doesn't mean they should be blindly disregarded.

No but they should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Assuming that eggs are actually bad for you and do contribute to heart disease (they seem to go back and forth on this every second Tuesday...), I'd still take the heart disease over the diabetes from the sugar-blasted breakfast foods.

It doesn't have to be either. Common breakfasts in france include eating 1 yogurt, or 1 croissant, or 1 toast with butter. Some people do eat 1 toast with jam, which might fit into your "sugar blasted" category.

In general, we're pretty light on breakfast and we don't have high diabete prevalence compared to countries like the US or even Germany.

I don't think 1 toast with jam comes anywhere near sugar blasted. Comparing to the (plastic) stuff I see people (not exclusively in the US either as children in Spain and the UK seem to do it as well) eat.

As if anyone has ever shown diabetes is caused solely by sugary foods. You might be getting a package deal there.

Anecdotally, I eat two eggs with hot sauce and toast for breakfast every morning. Lipid panel just came back fine. When I switched from cereal I stopped feeling like crap all morning. (And I wasn't eating sugary cereal to start with -- mostly plain yogurt, oatmeal, and a few raisins. Dessert cereals like granola are a whole other level of misery afterwards.)

If I had to restrict my diet that much, I'd rather die early.

Oh friend, I am not American but we share similar childhood memories. I have traveled much in America and McDonald's/IHOPs/Denny's were a staple breakfast!

When I was in Japan, I would often eat breakfast in a hurry by getting some groceries from 7-11. Such a breafast would usually consist of a smal pack of fried rice, with a pastry or two, and some juice or milk, for about 500Y if I remember correctly. Everything tasted good, but I cannot say it was "healthier" than what I'd have in America. But again, that was a 7-11 5 minute breakfast...

If I end up in a situation where McDonald's breakfast is the option, I always just get a couple of hashbrowns.

300 calories (150 each), deliciously greasy. I can't imagine eating them regularly though.

When I was travelling in the US I thought it was great. Eat one normal portion at 8 or 9 in the morning, walk around all day and only get hungry at 6pm or later.

Hah, the difference is, in middle America they are washing that breakfast down with a Coke or a coffee with 10 sugars, then a big fast food burger at noon, then snacks, then a big dinner.

I think this is a very cartoonish and incorrect statement.

I live in Arkansas, and nobody I know eats like that. Nobody I grew up with in rural Virginia eats like that either. Unusually ignorant and poor people in rural America will eat that way, but there are plenty of those in the inner cities as well.

While of course there are higher rates of obesity in "middle America", the portrayal you paint reeks of elitist snobbery.

I'm from Texas, I witnessed this all the time growing up, as well as working in a professional office for a software company.

Did I say everyone does it? No, but it is common enough. Are people improving? Yes, many, but still most are stuck with horrible habits.

In the 90s, my school teachers almost always had a can of Coke or fast food fountain soda cup for breakfast. Yes, Coke.

yes if you cave a busy day and wont be able to fit a proper lunch in the Full English is the way to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huSP7PtctC4

Burger King has lunch/dinner all day!

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