A hearty breakfast ought to be, as the cliché goes, your family’s most important meal of the day. Studies show that if you take time for a morning meal, you’ll likely consume fewer calories during the course of the day, as well as reduce your chance of becoming overweight by 30 percent. Your young’ns, meanwhile, will enjoy stronger cognitive abilities (and better grades). Bottom line: Breakfast is like the foundation of your family’s house—everything else rests on it.

But when food marketers get involved, a “hearty breakfast" turns into something more akin to a “heart-unhealthy breakfast.” By peddling fatty scrambles, misguided muffin missiles, and pancakes that look like manhole covers, the country’s most popular breakfast joints may be helping to catapult your blood sugar, sap your energy levels, and tell your body to store fat. To help guard your family against such morning mishaps, we searched out the good, the bad, and the greasy to uncover the best (and worst) breakfast foods in America.

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