Bacon Brings us Together

Our four year old isn’t racing to dress in time to wave goodbye to Dada from the front step. I’m not packing last minute lunches or trying to squeeze in a shower while the baby still sleeps.

This sudden slowdown can leave our family of four wanting to engage with each other but unsure; morning family time is not the norm. Enter my simple solution: bacon.

Here are 3 ways:

Bacon’s smell is uplifting. It puts us all in a good mood. It’s science.

The part of our brain that regulates stress levels, emotions, and memories is directly connected to our sense of smell. The olfactory nerve sends signals directly to the limbic system. Smell is the only sense that can directly stimulate the limbic area of the brain and smell can immediately stimulate the brain to shift to calm. The smell of bacon promotes this calm in our brains, improving our moods. And, since smell also triggers memories, I like thinking that when our girls smell bacon in their adult lives, happy memories of Saturday mornings at home will surface.

“Bacon is actually a health food. It’s what we do to bacon that makes it ‘bad’ for us,” Our primary care doctor said as we were discussing my daughter’s diet last year. Bacon…healthy? That was a new one for me. While the nutrition gurus I read (Cate Shanahan, Mark Hyman, Ben Greenfield) haven’t deemed bacon a “health food”, they encourage eating healthy fats, including bacon in moderation. Sugar-free and nitrate-free bacon is a good source of healthy fats. Garret Valley Bacon, which I buy at Natural Grocers, is great.

Once the bacon is off the skillet, I scramble eggs in the bacon grease, which my family loves. And being the brain science lover that I am, I can feel good knowing that a breakfast full of healthy fats is helping build our daughter’s neural connections, boosting cognitive function and mood.

Our brains are 60% fat and need it to function!

We all sit around the table at breakfast. Face to face. We talk about the plans for the day. We laugh at the baby who claps every time we say grace. We listen to the four year old who gives us an amusing weather prediction straight from her bedtime story “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs”.

The tone is set for a weekend of putting family first, and, even though there may be rough patches, I have peace knowing our priorities are in place. All thanks to a little bacon.