The traditional American breakfast of cereal, pancakes, and waffles is basically dessert in disguise. It’s extremely high in sugar and carbohydrates, low in fiber and protein, and designed to give you a momentary boost of energy that can lead to a big-time crash by the time you get to work.
To get your day off to the right start, your body really needs protein, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats. That’s why a new breakfast trend is taking hold in America: soup. It’s an easy way to get the nutrients you need, it’s easy to digest, and it’s great for people in a hurry or on a budget.
Popular food influencer Suzy Karadsheh, creator of The Mediterranean Dish, shared the benefits of soup for breakfast and a recipe for chicken and vegetable soup in a TikTok video earlier this year.
Soup for breakfast might sound unconventional, but it’s actually one of the most nourishing ways to start your day! In many Mediterranean (and Asian) cultures, mornings begin with something warm and savory — a bowl of soup wakes up your digestion gently, hydrates your body after a night of rest, and gives you real nourishment before the day gets busy. That’s exactly why this Chicken Vegetable Soup works so well in the morning. It’s light but satisfying, made with chicken, vegetables, fresh herbs, and broth. Nothing heavy — just clean ingredients. Why soup for breakfast just makes sense: 1. It’s easier to digest than most breakfasts 2. It hydrates + nourishes at the same time 3. It keeps you full without the crash If you’re curious to try a savory, comforting breakfast that actually supports your energy and digestion, this Chicken Vegetable Soup is a great place to start! Ingredients: ▢1 tablespoon olive oil ▢1 to 1 ½ pounds boneless skinless chicken breast ▢Kosher salt ▢Freshly ground pepper ▢3 carrots peeled, small dice ▢3 celery stalks, small dice ▢2 Yukon gold potatoes, small dice ▢1 medium onion, diced ▢1 bay leaf ▢1 teaspoon dried thyme ▢1/2 teaspoon oregano ▢1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or more to taste ▢3 large garlic cloves ▢1 (14.5 ounce) can of petite-cut diced tomatoes ▢1 small zucchini, sliced into half quarter moons ▢8 cups (64 ounces) chicken stock ▢1/2 cup chopped parsley Season & sear the chicken: Heat a large Dutch oven over medium with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Season chicken generously with salt and pepper. Add to the pot and cook until golden, about 12 minutes per side, until fully cooked (165°F). Transfer to a plate. Cook the vegetables: Add carrots, celery, onion, and potatoes to the pot, scraping up any browned bits. Add bay leaf, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. Cook undisturbed for 15 minutes. Add garlic and cook 5 minutes more. Finish the soup: Add tomatoes, zucchini, and chicken stock. Bring to a boil and simmer 15–20 minutes, until potatoes are tender. Shred the chicken and return it to the pot to warm through. Garnish & serve: Stir in chopped parsley and serve. #breakfastsoup#soupforbreakfast#breakfastideas#souprecipe#soups♬ original sound – The Mediterranean Dish
“It’s a soup for breakfast kind of morning, guys. And if it sounds weird to you, let me tell you, soup for breakfast is an ancient remedy. It’s been around for centuries,” Karadsheh said. “First of all, it’s a great way to fight inflammation, especially that morning inflammation right away. And it hydrates way better than water. And it’s also a great way to kick start my digestive system without that sugar crash.”
Soup is great for hydration
Soup is great for staying hydrated because, in addition to being a good source of water, it can be rich in salt and electrolytes that help you retain water. That’s a major reason we eat chicken soup when we’re sick and why it can make us feel better.
A bowl of soup. Photo credit: Nguyen Huy/Pexels
Nutritionist Kat Chan, author of Full Serving, is a big believer in soup for breakfast.
“I love that it breaks the breakfast rules,” she wrote. “It’s cross-cultural, and there are no specific guidelines other than including protein, fat, and fiber. A warm, protein-rich, hydrating bowl – with a broth base – stabilizes blood sugar, supports digestion, and helps people feel more settled going into the day.”
She says that a bowl of soup in the morning is a great way to get your digestive system up and running.
“From a nutritional therapy standpoint, warm meals are often easier to digest than cold ones, especially if you’re already feeling the chill,” Chan continued. “Eating something warm first thing gives your body a solid hit of protein, fat, and fiber—the kind that keeps blood sugar steady and energy smooth.”
Eating soup for breakfast offers a warm, nutrient-dense, and hydrating start to the day that supports digestion and provides sustained energy. It is a gentle way to nourish the body, reduces, and helps stabilize blood sugar, making it a highly effective alternative to sugary morning foods. -Improve digestion and hydration -Sustained energy and satiety -Nutrient dense and low calorie -Weight management -Convenience and versatility It may sound unusual at first, but hear me out: soup isn’t just for lunch or dinner. It’s nourishing, convenient, and energizing, offering a satisfying way to fuel your morning. Breakfast soup delivers a range of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and protein in a single, easy-to-digest meal. It’s not only filling but also gentler on the stomach and can help your energy and mood, and keep your blood sugar stabilized. Soup for breakfast also has cultural roots worldwide. In Japan, miso soup is often paired with rice and pickles; in China, congee is enjoyed with savory toppings; and in Korea, hearty soups like Seolleongtang are common first meals. Starting the day with a warm, nutrient-rich bowl is a time-honored tradition. #soupforbreakfast#chinesebaddie#healthyfood♬ Carefree Days – Peaceful Reveries
Soup is healthy and affordable
Soup is also a great way for people on a budget to have a nutritious breakfast. A healthy can of soup can cost as little as $2 for a bowl, and if you make it at home, a big batch with fresh vegetables, broth, and a bit of protein shouldn’t set you back more than a few bucks.
At first, switching from cereal to soup may make a lot of folks do a double-take, but once you get past the fact that it’s a major break from the American cultural norm, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe the weird part isn’t eating soup in the morning, but the fact that we ever thought Frosted Flakes was a great way to start the day in the first place.
A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing.
Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold.
A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen.
Volunteers raise a wall for the framework of a new home during the first day of building at Habitat for Humanity’s 2025 Carter Work Project.
Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing.
Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth.
Marsha and her son pose for a photo while building their future home with Southern Crescent Habitat for Humanity in Georgia.
Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.
Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:
Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis
Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community
Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or in one of 60+ countries where we work around the globe
Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door
Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone.
There’s a nationwide running joke that the food we get from fast-food places isn’t actually food. That doesn’t stop Americans from consuming it. But we do so assuming that this food, which can fossilize in the back of a minivan, is still edible. One man decided to see whether fast food contains enough nutrients to grow vegetables if it’s turned into soil.
Ted Nivison is not a scientist, and does not play one on television. For this experiment, though, he dons a metaphorical lab coat and gloves. After spending time growing his own vegetables, he wanted to see what would happen if he changed up the soil. But instead of adding something practical, like Miracle-Gro, he decided to get innovative.
Nivison set his sights on making his own soil from fast-food scraps. In a YouTube video, he’s seen placing a large box on his kitchen counter.
“This is a Lomi. This is a device that lets you turn food scraps into usable soil, or at least what the company calls ‘Lomi Earth,’” he explains. “Obviously, by food scraps, they mean things like vegetables and fruit, but this device can turn any food scraps into soil. So what would happen if I turned fast food into soil? Could I grow a plant from that?”
Surprisingly, the answer to his question was yes. The curious man went to the nearest McDonald’s and dumped two double cheeseburgers, two large fries, 20 chicken nuggets, and a pack of apple slices into the soil-making device. The small machine takes up to 20 hours to turn food into dirt, so Nivison ran some errands before returning to check on the progress.
“I don’t know what I expected to happen here,” he says before it cuts to a clip of him returning home. “I’ve left the Lomi going and my entire apartment smells like McDonald’s.”
When the video cuts back to the present, Nivison reveals, “I had to open up the windows in my apartment just to filter out the air that I was smelling, and I gotta say, the resulting dirt is a little bit creepy.”
He opens the lid to reveal a bright, reddish-brown, dry, clumpy soil that he says smells like Cheetos. The amateur scientist also describes the soil as greasy. This doesn’t dissuade him, though he muses that a plant might taste the soil and say, “I guess I’m not going to live.”
Unfortunately, the McDonald’s haul didn’t produce enough soil to fill a pot, so he decided to mix things up by creating soil from Taco Bell and KFC, too.
The soil from Taco Bell looks closest to actual potting soil, which he attributes to the food having more vegetables. But the soil from KFC was so incredibly greasy that you could hear it as he moved it around.
To conduct the experiment, he set up a control group, a nod to his high school science education. Then he split the dirt into multiple clay pots with varying levels of traditional potting soil mixed in. One pot contained soil created solely from the fast-food concoction.
It turns out the more Lomi dirt used, the harder the soil became when it was watered. Nivison speculates that this is due to the grease content:
“With 100% Lomi dirt, it looks like the surface of Mars. And I don’t even think the guy in The Martian would’ve been able to grow potatoes from this. This is worse than Mars dirt. It is gross. When I watered it, none of the water would seep into the dirt. It just sat on top, turning into something like a swamp.”
After seeing the progress of the plant grown in 10% fast-food dirt, he decided to increase the amount, making sure not to exceed 50%. Seeds planted in 50% to 100% fast-food dirt molded, but so did the seeds planted in 15% Lomi dirt. Unexpectedly, the arugula planted in 20% fast-food dirt sprouted, though it eventually stopped growing.
If you thought the control plant grew the best, you’d be just as shocked as Nivison. The control plant never got beyond the small initial sprouts. It was the plant soaking up that 10% mixture of greasy fast food that outgrew them all. All that experimenting made for a fairly hungry scientist, so he made an arugula salad.
James Prigioni makes popular gardening videos on YouTube. In one, he wanted to see if he could grow a whole tomato plant by planting the seeds from a tomato on a McDonald’s burger. He picked up a Deluxe Quarter Pounder with cheese, pulled out a tomato slice, and removed two seeds. After rubbing the seeds on a paper towel to remove the protective coating, which can inhibit sprouting, they were ready to plant.
Trying out different seed-planting methods
But like any good scientist, Prigioni wanted to try a different method for testing McDonald’s tomato seeds. So he pulled a slice of tomato from a second Quarter Pounder and, instead of extracting the seeds, planted the entire slice.
With the help of a heat mat and a grow lamp, both sets of seedlings germinated and sprouted in soil-filled red Solo cups in about a week. After they were fully established, Prigioni separated the plants so they could thrive individually before being planted outside.
He planted one of the plants in the ground outside and another in a 5-gallon bucket. He then showed how he culled the lower leaves as they developed blight and used a tomato cage to support the plants as they produced fruit and grew heavier. He also added extra fertilized soil and mulch to the bucket plant.
After three months, the plants were producing abundant fruit. The bucket plant didn’t perform as well as the in-ground plant, which Prigioni said was due to insufficient watering during very hot days. The bucket plant also ripened faster, likely due to the stress it had been under. Still, it was an impressive harvest, especially for a plant that started on a McDonald’s burger.
The in-ground McDonald’s plant was even more incredible, with dozens of tomatoes dripping from it.
“I expected this tomato to grow,” Prigioni said, “but I did not expect this.”
The fruit from both plants tasted good and sweet, he said. By the fourth month, the in-ground plant was starting to struggle with its health, but not with its fruit production.
“The plant had so many tomatoes on it that it seemed like it was having a little difficulty ripening that much fruit at one time,” Prigioni said. “I mean, I have had some plants with a lot of tomatoes on them, but never in my life have I seen a single tomato plant with this much fruit on it. I was completely blown away.”
How the McDonald’s tomatoes compared
He said one of his favorite parts of the experiment was seeing what kind of tomatoes would grow from the seeds. He thought it might be a beefsteak variety, but it turned out to be a Roma type. However, he surmised that the McDonald’s tomato was likely a hybrid, based on its ripening characteristics.
Prigioni also shared how the McDonald’s tomato plants compared with his other tomato plants.
“In another area of the garden, I grew Roma tomatoes that I got from Lowe’s, and I planted them at the same time as the McDonald’s tomatoes,” he said. “The harvest from them wasn’t quite as large, but the fruit ripened way more evenly, and I was able to harvest a lot more fresh fruit right off the vine that was ripe.”
“Overall, I was shocked with the level of production,” he continued. “And this is probably my favorite experiment that I’ve ever done. I mean, to be able to take a cheeseburger, grab a tomato from it, then grow a tomato plant, and then harvest pounds and pounds of tomatoes from it is just such a unique and refreshing experience.”
Perhaps an unexpected result, but a great way to challenge our assumptions and demonstrate the power of nature, even in the context of fast food.
In the era of supermarkets and wholesale clubs, growing your own food isn’t a necessity for most Americans. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to try.
A household garden can be a great way to reduce your grocery bill and increase your intake of nutrient-dense foods. It can also be a good source of exercise and a hobby that gets you outside in the sunshine and fresh air more often. However, not everyone has a yard where they can grow a garden or much outdoor space at all where they live. You can plant things in containers, but that requires some upfront investment in planters.
Potted plants and herbs can thrive in a container garden. Photo credit: Canva
Or does it? Gardener James Prigioni set out to see if an Amazon shipping box would hold up as a planter for potatoes. He took a basic single-walled Amazon box, lined it with dried leaves to help with moisture retention, added four to five inches of soil (his own homegrown soil he makes), added three dark red seed potatoes, covered them with more soil, added a fertilizer, then watered them.
He also planted a second, smaller Amazon box with two white seed potatoes, following the same steps.
Two weeks later, he had potato plants growing out of the soil. Ten days after that, the boxes were filled with lush plants.
Prigioni explained how to “hill” potato plants when they grow tall enough, which helps encourage more tuber growth and protect the growing potatoes from sunlight. Hilling also helps support the plants as they grow taller so they don’t flop over. He also added some mulch to help keep the plants cooler as the summer grew hotter.
After hilling, Prigioni only needed to keep up with watering. Both varieties of potatoes flowered, which let him know the tubers were forming. The red potato leaves developed some pest issues, but not bad enough to need intervention, while the white potato plants were unaffected. “It goes to show how variety selection can make a big difference in the garden,” he explained.
The visible plants have to start dying before you harvest potatoes, and Prigioni checked in with the boxes themselves when they got to that point.
“I am pleasantly surprised with how well the boxes held up,” he said, especially for being single-walled boxes. The smaller box was completely intact, while the larger box had begun to split in one corner but not enough to affect the plants’ growth. “This thing was completely free to grow in, so you can’t beat that,” he pointed out.
Prigioni predicted that the red potatoes grown in the larger box would be more productive. As he cut open the box and pulled potatoes from the larger box, they just kept coming, ultimately yielding several dozen potatoes of various sizes. The smaller box did have a smaller yield, but still impressive just from two potatoes planted in an Amazon box.
People often think they don’t have room to grow their own food, which is why Prigioni put these potato boxes on his patio. “A lot of people have an area like this,” he said.
“I will never look at cardboard boxes the same,” Prigioni added. “There are so many uses for them in the garden and it’s just a great free resource we have around, especially if you’re ordering stuff from Amazon all the time.”
People loved watching Prigioni’s experiment and shared their own joy—and success—in growing potatoes in a similar fashion:
“I have been growing potatoes in every box I can find for several years now. I have had excellent success. I honestly think potatoes prefer cardboard. And yes, most of my boxes were from Amazon.”
“I live in an upstairs apartment with a little deck and I have a container garden with containers on every single stair leading to the deck. I grow potatoes in a laundry basket. It’s amazing how much food I can get from this type of garden!! Grateful.”
“I literally got up and grabbed the empty boxes by our front door, the potatoes that have started to sprout, and soil i had inside and started my planting at 1am. Lol. I will take them outside today and finish. Thank you James!”
“I grew potatoes and tomatoes on my tiny balcony in Germany (in buckets and cardboard boxes). Now I have a big garden here in America. I so love to grow my own food.”
“I grew sweet potatoes in cardboard boxes. It’s so much fun.”
Next time you’re stuck with an Amazon box that you don’t have a use for, consider whether you could use it as a planter for potatoes or some other edible harvest. Gardening doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective.
