Make sure you brush, floss, and rinse well after this one; nobody wants sardine breath.

Earlier this year I posted about my Spicy Oatmeal breakfast, which I’m sure produced a few sidelong glances among people who dared read about it. However, I recently had some blood test results that have prompted my doctors to suggest that I incorporate more food into my diet that will help lower my cholesterol and blood sugar levels. The recommendation was to adopt the Mediterranean diet; lots of vegetables, fruits, and a moderate helping of fish.

Moral Fiber

I had also been told, years before this most recent blood work, that I should eat either oatmeal or Cheerios for breakfast (for the beneficial fiber). My LDL levels were beginning to rise slightly and oats provide a “sticky” kind of fiber that globs onto cholesterol in your gut and helps carry it out of your body before it can be absorbed into your bloodstream.

I’ve enjoyed Cheerios (plain and “honey nut”) since I was a kid, but there’s a lot of fat and calories I don’t need in the whole milk I would ordinarily pour onto it — and using skim milk is pretty close to pouring straight water onto your cereal. I recall hearing something in Sunday School¹ about being cast straight into Hell if you pour water on your cereal. Besides that, it seems kinda gross (says the guy who now eats room-temperature fish for breakfast).

Still, for some reason, water on oatmeal, despite also being a cereal grain, doesn’t raise any eyebrows. Plain instant oatmeal is also much cheaper than Cheerios (unless you go for the Hannaford brand “Tasteeos”, which are good too), so it was much easier to adopt into my breakfast routine without going too hard against the social order and ending up on Big Grain’s enemies list.

The Meat Of It

Electing to use water in my oatmeal also means that I’m cutting out whatever protein the milk would provide. Lots of people eat a couple of eggs with their breakfast, maybe paired with some bacon, to get their protein. However, I have three main objectives for my personalized breakfast plan.

Here they are in order of priority:

1. be healthy/nutritious
2. be quick/convenient
3. be tasty

You could argue over my priorities, but that’s what they are — at least for now. Instant oatmeal fits the bill perfectly. The exact amount of oatmeal comes in a nice little packet with cooking instructions on the side and a fill line to measure the exact amount of water needed to pour right into the packet. Microwave for 1.5 minutes, add whatever seasoning/flavoring I want (usually pepper and hot sauce), and voila! A delicious and fiber-rich breakfast is served.

As for protein, eggs are a great option. The problem is they require cooking. If not fried in a pan, then at least microwaved in a separate container for about 30 seconds. Admittedly, it’s not that much extra work (at all), but I’m already “cooking” the oatmeal, so I’m looking for something that is pre-cooked and ready to eat.

I’m like a kid when it comes to breakfast — no patience for lengthy or even mildly complex recipes. I want the entire affair of preparing my breakfast to take roughly 3-5 minutes, including the coffee. And I don’t mean like those recipes that claim to take “3-5 minutes” when in reality they take closer to 10-20 minutes after you factor in prep and cook time (plus the extra dirty dishes made in the process, and don’t even get me started on the ads you’ll have to endure while reading the recipe on the website…) Ain’t nobody got time for that.

I want to be sitting at the table, eating breakfast and watching Good Mythical Morning, six minutes after I walk into the kitchen.

Enter the humble tin of sardines. A simple 3 oz tin of sardines you can find at any grocery store. I buy the slightly more expensive ones that have the skin and bones still in them and are packed in olive oil (helps to satisfy the “Mediterranean” part of the diet) with slightly less sodium. The skin and bones (yes, you eat the bones) provide fatty acids, calcium, and phosphorus, among other beneficial nutrients.

I hadn’t really considered sardines until I started looking around for good sources of protein that were Mediterranean-friendly. Interestingly, I found a guy on YouTube who’s channel is devoted to reviewing different brands of tinned fish. Talk about niche.

I’ve been eating sardines for breakfast on most days of the week for about a month now. I find that I need to include one or two cans of sardine fillets packed in water just to change it up a bit during the week. I usually follow up the oatmeal and sardines with an apple an hour or so later, just to tide me over until lunch.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with that for now. I’ll let you know how it’s affecting my blood work in a few months.

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1. Side note: While I did attend “Sunday School” for a brief period as a kid, I only use that term here because it’s widely recognized as that extracurricular “class” where we learned about Jesus and all that. We didn’t actually call it Sunday School when I was a kid. We called it “religion class”. I think it said something about the state of the church in that time and place when we didn’t call it by the name it’s commonly known as, let alone the more technical sounding term catechism. I didn’t even learn the meaning of the word catechism until I was a much older adult. ↩︎