I’ve never been a breakfast eater, and I don’t know that I’ve missed anything. I simply can’t face food when I get up. Coffee is all I ever have.
There seems a be an old wive’s tale that breakfast is the most important meal, because you can’t make the day without it. Even when I worked physically, I didn’t find that to be true.
Are there any studies, any evidence, that this folk wisdom is wise?
a spinoff from this GD thread
Certainly your blood sugar will be at a very low ebb, as its been around 14 hours since you ate anything. I don’t think it’s unhealthy not to eat breakfast but it would help your body and brain ramp up for the day if they had a little fuel.
I thought the “important meal of the day” thing came about when people started to introduce breakfast food that was specifically made for breakfast. Before the introduction of breakfast food people in the United States would generally eat whatever was left over from last night’s dinner in the morning.
Marc
Not wanting to hijack, but this also raises the question why so many people can’t face food first thing in the morning. After all, even with slower digestion during sleep, it’s been a long time since you last ate - in fact, that’s origin of the word “breakfast”, since it breaks a fast. You’d think you’d be pretty damned hungry, but, like the OP, I, along with many others, have zero appetite for a few hours - coffee and juice is just fine, thanks.
Maybe this answers the OP - it’s an important meal for those that wake up hungry, and not for those of us who don’t. I just wish that breakfasters wouldn’t keep nagging me to eat something early AM … and then saying “it’s the most important meal of the day”. Well, it might be for you, chum, but not for me.
There was an article in New Scientist describing studies. The beginning of the article is here, but you need to be a subscriber to get into the detail.
They found that the type of breakfast affected performance on mental and physical tasks, but in different ways. The best preparation for physical tasks was actually no breakfast, which produced the fastest physical response times. Hence we can expect you to be lightning fast on the trigger-finger in your early morning moderating.
The best preparation for mental tasks was a breakfast that slowly released glucose, e.g. All-bran. High-sugar cereal such as Coco-Pops was worse than a slow-releaser, but still better than nothing.
The benefits that are touted for a sugar rush are pretty much old wives tales.
I never eat breakfast either. Or, occasionally if I attend some function with muffins or doughnuts and partake, it completely wrecks my lunch appetite. I’m much better off without breakfast. I’ll have a couple of cups of coffee at work: occasionally tea. By 11:30 I’m ready for lunch.
Really? I assumed that, before the introduction of breakfast food, most people lived on farms & thus had fresh milk & eggs in the morning.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. All cereal foods are highly concentrated in terms of calories, in fact most people are surprised to find that sweet biscuits (cookies for those in the US), savoury crackers, pasta, noodles, breakfast cereals no matter how “healthy”, all contain more than 3 calories per gram.
I would expect that a breakfast of bacon and eggs would provide far longer lasting energy reserves than any carbohydrate loaded choice.
A lot of weight loss books and websites make the claim that your metabolism needs some food in the morning to somehow “kick start” it. Otherwise you are supposedly in semi-hibernation mode and will burn fewer calories. :dubious:
It has always sounded like bullshit to me, and I’ve never found a good cite for it. Just a lot of websites repeating what all the other websites say. Is there any truth in it?
The research included reviewing 25 years of studies. I think you need a stronger argument than that it doesn’t make sense to you.
I don’t know if this explains it (probably vice versa), but traditional societies often had a day like this. Get up at 4 and have a hot drink (what? even tea only came to Europe relatively recently), go out and milk the cows or whatever, then at six have a major meal, work all morning, dinner around noon, work all afternoon, light supper (word comes from French word souper, meaning something to do with soup), then to bed by 8.
Going back to early evolutionary history of humans, perhaps we had to get up and catch (or at least gather) our food before we could eat anything and we evolved not to be hungry on waking. Just speculation.
Incidentally, personally, I love a big breakfast. But many people I know cannot face it.
Well, first off, why is that so bad? Compared to fats and protiens, carbs are of lower or equal caloric “density.”
Remember, though, you can’t simply compare calories when talking about energy that someone will get from a given food. There is a term called Glycemic Index which tracks how quickly blood sugar levels will peak after eating a given food. Simple carbs give the fastest peaks, but more complex carbs, like the fiber heavy foods mentioned above, give a more steady rise in blood sugar levels.
Do you have a cite for that? I have never heard that people ate last night’s dinner for breakfast before.
I’ll speak from personal experience and say, yes, there is truth to it. Maybe not in the framework they say it does, though. I don’t know about “kick-starting” one’s metabolism, but I will say that starting to eat a good breakfast (i.e., not just having coffee, and not a refined-carb loaded breakfast like two glazed donuts and coffee with sugar and cream either) was pretty key to my losing weight.
One cite from a recent NY Times (opinion) article about the importance of breakfast mentioned this: New research by John M. de Castro of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Tex., suggests that morning intake of carbohydrates and fats in particular may reduce overall daily intake. He analyzed weeklong food diaries recorded by 867 people and found that breakfast eaters consumed significantly less than those who skipped the morning meal. On average, for every 240 calories more of carbohydrate or fat they ate early in the day, they took in 240 fewer total calories over the entire day.
I think the real reason it matters is that for many (and definitely for me), skipping breakfast meant I was very hungry for lunch. My eating pattern basically fell into eating two very large meals a day, a big lunch and a huge dinner. Aside from what I ate, this pattern of eating contributed to my gaining quite a lot of weight after I turned 30 years old.
By changing nothing in my food choices but only eating on a different schedule, eating four times a day including breakfast, I lost 15 lbs. in 4 weeks. In analyzing how/why, it’s clear that I ate a lot fewer calories per sitting when I wasn’t starving at the start of each meal, and also that eating a large meal leaves more “left over” to store as fat in the digestion process than spreading it out over multiple meals.
I also find that I wake up hungry now, where I did not used to. I would often eat a large meal late at night within an hour or two of going to bed, and use “that sleepy feeling” from stuffing myself to help myself fall asleep. That’s another way to accumulate fat. Waking up hungry is a good thing.
I’m sure there will be people about to jump in and say “I never eat breakfast and I’m perfectly fit”. Well sure that’s possible, everyone’s metabolism is different. But in my case, “common wisdom” worked out very well, and should be the starting point for anyone before deciding that they’re special.
I’ve heard that if you aren’t hungry for breakfast, you ate too much the night before.
That does make some sense to me.
One of the great lessons in my life was to skip breakfast.
I usually have, anyway, since I was a child, but though I have always favored a protein-heavy breakfast (and have generally never eaten breakfast cereals), I found myself distractingly hungry a few hours later. This was a real problem in high school (when I was first able to make myself breakfast before a “big day”) and a huge problem during my clinical years in medical school, especially rotations where morning rounds might last several hours. I’d eat a 5-6am, and by 8-9am I could hardly think about anything but lunch.
I think i actually noticed the pattern in high school, but the brainwashing was so firmly rooted that I still “virtuously” ate breakfast on important/stressful days. Since I’d get up early to prepare, and cooking has always relaxed me, I always made breakfast, but it it never served me well.
My blood sugar is pretty constant throughout the day, whether I eat or not, unless i I eat a good sized meal (since I have ready access to blood sugar meters and am a diehard experimentalist, I’ve often logged it, and my intake, throughout the day in recent yers), and I am actually much more comfortable not eating until at least lunch, and often all day. If I want to lose a 5-10, I drop grains to reduce carbs and drop breakfast (and lunch or dinner if I’m not hungry) for a week or two
I don’t suggest that this would work for everyone. I firmly believe that we have far more diverse responses to diet than conventional wisdom allows. Such diversity makes a sort of evolutionary sense for a species of nomadic hunter-gatherer omnivores: some members will thrive under almost any available diet, rather than everyone suffering uniformly when the environment doesn’t cooperate.
I feel yucky if I eat breakfast; coffee and sometimes a breakfast bar is all I need. I actually feel sick and sluggish if I eat a big breakfast.
I also question this - my great-grandparents (born in 1913 and 1916) always spoke of eating a breakfast meal, usually with biscuits and milk. My great-grandmother even spoke of having a choice in the type of milk they would drink - sweet milk (I’m assuming maybe goat milk?), regular milk and buttermilk. Neither of them ever spoke of eating leftovers from the night before. My great-grandmother even mentioned that her mother-in-law would freeze biscuit dough and that her own dough never did as well after being frozen.