Your work performance is directed by your food intake in the morning, so you'd better start fuelling your engine, writes JOHN McKENNA
YOU ARE a passenger on a red-eye early morning flight out of Dublin, and the captain’s voice comes over the intercom, welcoming you on board, dishing out the flight details and the weather conditions ahead.
Then you hear a slight rumble, and the captain apologises, and says, “Oh sorry, sorry, that was my tummy. I just didn’t have time to grab any breakfast this morning before I rushed out the door. Cabin crew clear for take off, please.”
How do you feel now about the man in charge of the red-eye flight? Confident or concerned? Anxious or untroubled by the fact that the man who has to get you and your fellow passengers to your destination safely is, himself, running on an empty fuel tank.
Or how would you feel about the money trader who, making trades with your pension funds, is calling the shots after a hearty, fat-saturated breakfast roll bought in a service station and eaten while driving in the car?
My colleague Padraig O’Morain was writing on these pages recently about how money traders appear to work with higher levels of testosterone than people in other, less frenzied, occupations.
Frankly, it’s not the testosterone that concerns me. If you are dealing with my money, making gambles and bets with my pension funds and my future, then I want to ask a simple question that has nothing whatsoever to do with your sex hormones.
What I want to ask is: What did you eat for breakfast, before you donned your uniform, booted up your computer, punched the clock?
For Jim Kennedy, a level-5 sea kayaker and owner of Atlantic Sea Kayaking in west Cork, this question is of pivotal importance.
“I judge it by energy levels, and I see a huge difference in people, depending on what they have eaten before we begin the day’s course.
“Let’s say I have a group of eight kayakers, and one of them hasn’t eaten a good breakfast. Then that person, after a few hours, will be listless, they will be cold, they will have no enthusiasm.
“Their attention will wander, they won’t be focused.”
Well, that’s all very well for an extreme pursuit like sea kayaking, where the ideal thing to get through a day’s strenuous activity would be a big breakfast bowl of porridge slowly releasing all its energy into your system as you go through the paddle.
But surely the average office worker can get away with less, maybe just some rice krispies, or a cereal bar, or a sausage roll bought from a hot food counter?
Surely they don’t need the Michael Phelps breakfast?
Well, you might not need to eat like an Olympian to prepare for work, but consider what Barack Obama told Saveur magazine last year, when the Presidential race was in full flight.
What did the then-Democratic nominee put away before another long and gruelling day on the campaign trail?
The answer is, “Four to six eggs, potatoes and wheat toast. Every now and then, fruit, bacon and oatmeal.”
Blimey! That’s an athlete’s breakfast, albeit not quite the Phelp’s juggernaut, which went like this: three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate-chip pancakes; a five-egg omelette; three sugar-coated slices of French toast, a bowl of grits (maize-meal porridge), and two cups of coffee.
But the message is clear: your work performance is directed by your food intake in the morning.
As Jim Kennedy puts it: “We are just like a car, so fuel is essential.
“As we work, we use up the fuel, so people should eat quite often.
“Too many people are up and out the door with only a cereal bar, or a bowl of cornflakes, or some low-energy food, and it could be three or four hours before they eat anything.”
The thing about smart morning eating, research has shown, is not just that it gives you the fuel to function, but it also sets the mood for the rest of the day.
How many times have you found yourself tetchy and sullen at 11.30am, a well-known condition that Jim Kennedy also ascribes to dehydration: “My father-in-law is 100 years old, and every morning along with his porridge, he has a glass of water. You need to drink after having been asleep.”
But your morning fuel doesn’t just have to be porridge. The important thing is simply that you put a tiger in your tank before getting out the door.
“In Mexico when I kayak there I see people eating eggs and hot sauce,” says Kennedy.
“People with good diets eat whatever is appropriate, but the thing is that they do eat good food first thing in the morning.”
If it’s good enough for level-5 kayakers, gold medal Olympians and Presidents, then it’s sure good enough for me.
And just consider Senator John McCain’s reply to Saveur magazine regarding his morning food ritual: “Coffee, cereal, and fruit.”
He was bound to lose.
John McKenna is a food critic and writer. He is co-author of The Bridgestone Guides which aim to provide independent guides to Ireland’s food culture. See bridgestoneguides.com