Bacon’s back « Aurora Comms Blog

Bacon’s back

Posted on 06. Apr, 2010 by phaedrus in News

Having conveyed some guilt in my recent post, ‘Bacon on Test’, due to excess bacon consumption in the name of science, it happily all washed away one morning last week when my colleague, ‘Ze Frollein’, told me that “a fry-up is the best way to start your day”. Now, although it was April fool’s day, I trust ‘Ze Frollein’’s nutritional advice with every fibre of my being. However, of course, these were not her words but the words of Daily Mail reporters. Suffice it to say, I have not binned the sack of porridge I keep in my office desk just yet.

The news was of a study from the University of Alabama, that looked at the effects of varying type of food and time of consumption (in mice), and concluded that eating a fattier breakfast makes you less likely to eat unhealthily for the rest of the day. Consequently, these researchers advise bacon over fruit in the morning, claiming that “the first meal appears to programme your metabolism for the rest of the day.” So it’s fry-ups for breakfast all round, but what shall we have for lunch? A question the mice probably didn’t ask each other.

As someone who certainly doesn’t eat like a mouse, I wonder about the significance of an animal test sample. Are the psychological factors effecting human eating habits taken into account? Another colleague, ‘ChiantiChiara’, recently showed me an interesting article about subconscious adjustment of diet, based on peer influence, and we all select meals based on “what we ate yesterday”. However, these mice have no influence over their diet. It would be interesting to know how the investigators develop the diets they impose on their subjects, as true representation of human eating habits is essential to compare the effects on mice with the predicted effects on humans.

The bottom line is that an isolated piece of research such as this one should not necessarily be used as justification for a behavioural change as fundamental as diet modification. However, we are only human, so to respond to Mr Warburton’s comment on my last post, I may well now extend my test sample of bacon breakfast bites with the (albeit potentially deluded) perception that I am programming my metabolism for maximum digestive efficiency for the rest of the day.