Sep '23 (edited) in My Client Wins 📈
Is Skipping Breakfast Bad For You?
You’ve probably been told by your parents that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s such a ubiquitous phrase that it’s almost cliche. What is less commonly known, is the origin of this pervasive phrase. The Daily Telegraph credits dietitian Lenna Cooper with using this phrase in a 1917 article for Good Health magazine, which was published by a Michigan sanitarium operated by Kellogg’s. Cereal genius Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and fellow 7th Day Adventist James Caleb Jackson created the slogan in an effort to promote breakfast cereal. It clearly worked. The food giant made $1.4 billion U.S. dollars in profit in 2019 from its cereals.
Does breakfast really provide the ‘best possible start’ to the day, or is fasting better for us?
A report published in 2019 by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology concluded that skipping breakfast was associated with a significantly increased risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality.
Following the publication of this report, the following headlines were produced by 3 major news outlets: “Want to Lower Your Risk for Heart Disease? Eat Breakfast Every Morning” (Healthline) “Eating breakfast? Skipping a morning meal has a higher risk of heart-related death, study says” (USA TODAY)
“Study: Skipping breakfast increases risk of heart disease mortality by 87 percent” (FOX)
Looks like we all need to reach for a bowl of cereal as soon as we get out of bed right?
Absolutely not!
It’s time to review this report critically instead.
This report was produced as a result of the findings from a prospective cohort study looking at 6,550 adults who reportedly ate breakfast every day to people who never ate breakfast, and then following up with them (about 19 years later on average), tallying up the deaths from cardiovascular disease and deaths from all causes.
One question the newspapers failed to ask/report on about the population studies is: was eating breakfast or not eating breakfast the only difference between the 6,550 adults who took part in this study? The authors of the study reported that “participants who never consumed breakfast were more likely to be non-hispanic black, former smokers, heavy drinkers, unmarried, physically inactive, and with less family income, lower total energy intake, and poorer dietary quality when compared with those who regularly ate breakfast.”
Not only that, “participants who never consumed breakfast were more likely to have obesity and higher total blood cholesterol level than those who consumed breakfast regularly.”
There’s more:
What were the participants actually eating for breakfast? We don’t know. The investigators didn’t have information about what foods and beverages they consumed.
Did participants change their breakfast eating (or abstaining) habits over the course of almost 20 years? We don’t know, this information wasn’t collected.
Could there be errors in the classification of the causes of death in the participants? It’s possible.
What constitutes skipping breakfast? Was it the timing of the first meal of the day? We don’t know. Participants were asked, “How often do you eat breakfast?” but there was no definition of what that means, exactly.
'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day' originated as a marketing slogan and, while catchy, should be examined more closely.
Go ahead and skip breakfast if you please. If (as part of everything else you do to improve your quality of health) it makes you feel energized, satisfied, healthy, that's brilliant.
Go ahead and eat breakfast if you please. If (as part of everything else you do to improve your quality of health) it makes you feel energized, satisfied, healthy, that's brilliant brilliant.
There is no clear-cut benefit to being a breakfast skipper or an eater - and your dietary habits are only one piece of a much bigger puzzle that is your health and wellbeing.
Personally, I have not eaten breakfast regularly since I was 15. I never liked breakfast and over a long time, I just adapted to really not wanting to eat in the morning. I currently fast until 1/2 p.m. most days depending on my schedule.
As a health coach, I always defer to my clients’ instincts about when to eat, especially when they’re healthy and tuned into their bodies. In my own personal experience and from my experience working with clients, intermittent fasting is wonderfully freeing for some. It’s very straightforward. For others, especially those with a history of eating disorders and low body image, or for people who hope to leave dieting behind entirely, it can be a slippery slope to unhealthy patterns of restrictive eating.
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Is Skipping Breakfast Bad For You?
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