Bob Sits Down To Eat Breakfast

Bob Sits Down To Eat Breakfast

By Jim Reynolds

Bob sits down at the kitchen table with a plate that would make a nutritionist clutch their pearls:

two eggs over easy, a heel of whole-wheat bread toasted in bacon grease, and three strips of bacon curling like crisp punctuation marks around the edge of the plate.

To Bob, this isn’t indulgence.

It’s clarity.

Bob remembers the Food Pyramid.

He remembers margarine propaganda, cholesterol hysteria, demonized bacon, and the “healthy” cereals that launched 40 years of expanding waistlines. He remembers the experts who told him eggs were deadly, fat was poison, and that every breakfast needed to be built on a foundation of government-approved sugar.

And he remembers watching an entire country get sicker…

while doing exactly what they were told.

So when Bob cooks breakfast, he’s not just frying eggs —

he’s declaring independence from a nutritional bureaucracy that lost its mind sometime between Nixon and TikTok.

He spears a corner of toast — perfectly crisped in honest grease — and shakes his head.

“Let me get this straight,” Bob mutters. “This”—he holds up the toast—“is the enemy.

But toaster pastries shaped like cartoon animals? Recommended.

Fruit loops swimming in sugar milk? Great idea. Have another bowl.

Industrial oils engineered for machinery but repackaged as ‘heart healthy’? Perfectly safe!”

Bob laughs the way only a man who’s lived long enough to recognize nonsense can laugh.

“Sure,” he says. “Tell me another one.”

He takes a bite. It crunches the way real food does — not the way extruded food pretends to crunch.

And just as we settle into the skillet with him…

We need to pause.

Because before we go any further, we need to sweep the table clean of half a century of nutritional superstition.

THE GREAT AMERICAN BREAKFAST LIES

(A Brief But Necessary Interruption)

Let’s click off the big myths — the ones that stuck to the culture like syrup and wouldn’t come off.

1. “Eggs Will Kill You.”

No they won’t.

Modern science says:

• Dietary cholesterol has almost zero impact on blood cholesterol

• Eggs don’t increase heart disease risk

• Eggs are damn near perfect nutrition

If eggs were deadly,

your grandparents wouldn’t have lived long enough to spoil you.

2. “Saturated Fat Clogs Arteries.”

This was always a fairy tale told in a lab coat.

The real drivers of arterial trouble?

• sugar

• refined carbs

• inflammation

• ultra-processed foods

• sedentary life

Not bacon.

Not eggs.

Not the stuff your great-grandmother cooked with.

3. “Bacon Grease Is Toxic.”

Bacon grease is:

• mostly monounsaturated fat (olive oil’s cousin)

• heat-stable

• metabolically normal

• historically universal

It is not poison.

It is heritage.

Your great-grandmother kept it in a coffee tin and treated it like currency.

4. “Whole Wheat Bread Is a Miracle Food.”

It’s fine.

It’s bread.

It spikes your glucose slower than white bread, but pair it with real fat — like bacon grease — and the spike slows even more.

Bread isn’t the villain.

Seed oils and sugar are.

5. “Breakfast Should Be Low Fat.”

This single idea may have done more damage than disco. And face it — that dancing craze just about killed us.

Low fat = high sugar.

High sugar = high insulin.

High insulin = hunger, fog, and doctor visits.

Eat fat.

Your endocrine system will write you a thank-you note.

6. “Animal Fat Is Worse Than Seed Oil.”

Industrial oil — invented as a candle substitute — is not food.

Animal fat has been human fuel for 10,000 years.

One supports life.

The other supports cardiology bills.

Now Back to Bob…

Having demolished half a century of dietary fiction — and feeling invigorated by the truth — Bob turns back to his skillet.

The bacon grease shimmers like a rebellious sunrise.

He takes a slice of whole-wheat bread, lays it into the pan, and listens to it sizzle.

This isn’t cooking.

This is civil disobedience.

He flips it once.

Golden. Crisp. A piece of edible rebellion.

Bob holds it up like a sommelier evaluating a vintage.

“Delicious,” he says.

“And not bad for you.”

Then he pauses, because there’s one more truth that deserves its own moment:

Why Would Mother Nature Put a Death Trap Inside an Egg?

Think about it.

An egg is literally a self-contained life-support capsule —

designed to build an entire organism from scratch.

It is:

• perfect protein

• essential fats

• brain-development nutrients

• fat-soluble vitamins

• minerals

• a blueprint for life

Why would Nature hide a heart attack inside her own construction kit?

She wouldn’t.

If eggs were lethal,

the species that eats them wouldn’t be here to argue about it.

The danger was never the egg.

It was the story we were told about the egg.

You can beat an egg —

boil it, fry it, poach it, scramble it.

Do whatever you want to it.

But the egg wins anyway.

It always wins.

Because the egg isn’t the enemy of life.

The egg is life.

And in the end, the egg is us.

Final Grook

We crack the shell to take its worth,

believing we command the start;

we beat it, boil it, bend its birth,

and think we play the greater part.

But life was there before our plans,

in yolk and white it came to us—

the humble orb in Nature’s hands:

the egg is life, and we are thus.