I’ve often heard, “it’s the best thing since sliced bread”. You probably have too. Is sliced bread that great? Is it rare to have something better than sliced bread? Personally, I can think of a lot of things better than sliced bread – a straight-from-the-garden salad, a grass-fed filet mignon, a day at the beach and even a good book.  I certainly think meditation is better than sliced bread.

Oddly, sliced bread gets all the credit while mediation is often dismissed as fringe, archaic, complicated to master, not for go-getters, etc.

I beg to differ.

Not only is meditation good for go-getters, executives, athletes, high-performers and just about anyone, bread, sliced or not sliced, really isn’t.

The best things can’t be seen

While we often favor what we can physically see and use to create an obvious tangible effect, when we look closer at this habit, there are many flaws.

Some of the most important things in life are invisible: love, imagination, happiness, awareness, consciousness, gravity, oxygen, etc.

Many things that are tangible are not the actual item we seemingly get value from. For example, when you give someone flowers, they don’t feel cared for or good emotions because you gave them a freshly killed plant that will now start to wither and lose its beauty while in their presence.

The flowers bring joy, love or good feelings because of the invisible effort that the receiver knows happened but never saw. The beauty of the flower is less about the actual physical plant and more about the intention that the giver presented it with.

Bread…meh

While we can survive off of bread, there are plenty of substitutes. Bread is certainly not the most nutritious food or even a necessary part of a healthy diet.

In fact, if you want to be your best self, in my opinion, and many others, meditation is better than sliced bread any day, for anyone, wishing to improve.

Most of the bread today is more like junk food than necessary food. Often we find bread with added sugar, preservatives, derived from GMO wheat and heavily sprayed with glyphosate.

The Paleo movement has drawn doubt on the role bread plays in an evolutionary-based diet, citing hunter-gatherer eating habits as not including grains. Regardless of the absolute truth of these ideas, grains that are not fermented are clearly harder to digest and get the nutrient value out of.

I discussed this in the article based around Michael Pollan’s Cooked, Breaking Bread Well. Beyond the process of making bread and the modern practice of added ingredients, the fact that bread (and grains) are higher in Omega-6 fatty acids brings up other issues.

Our diets today are too high in Omega-6s and too low in Omega-3s. The former being inflammatory and latter being anti-inflammatory. Many people start their day with grains and eat some form of grain for each meal and snack, every day for years.

Eventually, sliced or not, this leads to imbalances, added inflammation and a whole bunch of other things, like gut dysbiosis, insulin resistance and potentially, cognitive decline. If I got into all this here, there wouldn’t be an opportunity to discuss why meditation is better for you.

If you want more evidence and insights, check out neurologist David Perlmutter’s Grain Brain. Also, spend some time looking over the latest studies of the microbiome, NAFLD, Type 3 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and epigenetics.

Why is meditation better?

Without even comparing the two, I can confidently say meditation is better and is one of the most valuable things you can do for your health, happiness and success.

Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe that many of the world’s most successful people meditate.

Tim Ferriss has a very popular podcast where he interviews world-class performers to deconstruct their success.  He has also written three New York Times best-selling books. He meditates and at least 80% of all his guests do too. He’s asked them and tallied it up.

Meditation has so many benefits and more are being discovered and scientifically verified all the time. It won’t hurt to try it, any way you slice it.

As far as bread goes, slicing it doesn’t make it any better either.

If I haven’t convinced you so far, here’s the comparative analysis of mediation vs. sliced bread as an infographic.

Why Meditation is Better Than Sliced Bread

Want some examples of people you might be surprised meditate. Here’s a partial list for you to scan: