Inc.
Breakfast may be healthy, but it isn’t universally essential, especially for weight loss.
People Who Eat Breakfast Tend to Be Healthier—but the Meal Itself Isn’t the Reason
Author: Lucia Auerbach
The age-old advice that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? For most healthy adults, it’s nothing more than a myth.
The idea has survived largely because of what it overlooks. It rests on a pattern in survey data that was never proof of cause and effect. People who eat breakfast do tend to be healthier by almost every measure, but that does not mean breakfast is what makes them so.
The evidence suggests that whether a morning meal helps someone depends on the person and on other factors like hunger, schedule, and health goals.
“We have a vast amount of data from cross-sectional research, like national diet surveys, that really clearly shows that people who tend to have breakfast are consistently less overweight and more healthy by almost every metric than those who tend to skip breakfast,” James A. Betts, a professor of metabolic physiology at the University of Bath, told Inc.
Breakfast eaters tend to do other healthy things. As a group, they rarely smoke, drink less, keep saturated fat and sugar low, eat fiber, and stay active. Once those factors are accounted for, eating breakfast appears to be just another healthy habit.
“Breakfast is just one hallmark of someone trying to eat and live healthily,” Betts said, “rather than necessarily being a direct cause of good or improved health.”
Betts said that part of why the myth has endured is because, in the past, large surveys have attracted enormous attention, while the public rarely understands that they cannot establish cause and effect. Because health-conscious people are told breakfast matters, they keep eating it, and it keeps showing up in the data as a marker of good health.
None of this makes eating breakfast dangerous. It simply is not the weight-loss tool it has long been sold as.
What skipping breakfast does and doesn’t do
In a 2019 analysis, published in the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal, those who were assigned to eat breakfast took in about 260 extra calories a day, and those who skipped did not make them up later. That undercuts the idea that skipping the meal leaves you ravenous by dinner.
Krista Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois Chicago, agreed. She told Inc. that for those who are not hungry in the morning, pushing back the first meal can shorten the eating window. She said that the biggest misconception in her field is that fasting can wreck one’s metabolism. When people lose weight, resting metabolic rate dips a little, but previous studies have shown that fasting adds no extra slowdown.
“You don’t have to eat breakfast to lose weight,” Varady told Inc.
Yet, there are exceptions. For some people, a morning meal is important. Roxana Ehsani, a sports dietitian, told Inc. that certain groups should eat breakfast. That includes people managing blood sugar, those who graze on snacks into the evening, and those who overeat at lunch and dinner.
Additionally, children and pregnant or lactating women should eat every day, she said. Even those trying to lose weight can benefit, since a morning meal curbs hunger and heads off snacking later.
The mistake Ehsani sees most often is not skipping breakfast but eating the wrong one. A croissant, muffin, or bagel is a pile of refined carbohydrates with little protein or fiber.
“You’re often hungry again within an hour or two,” she said. Breakfast doesn’t even have to require eating breakfast foods, she added. Last night’s leftovers count.
The cognitive benefits of breakfast
The one clear short-term benefit shows up in the brain. According to Uma Naidoo, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and nutritional biologist, breakfast can provide immense benefits for cognitive health. Breaking the overnight fast gives a small but reliable boost to memory in adults. In children, it sharpens attention and memory, with the biggest gains seen in undernourished kids.
Even so, she cautioned against pinning brain health on any single meal. “The reliable benefit comes from a sustained overall dietary pattern maintained over years, not from any one meal or ingredient,” she said.
Credits: TCA, LLC.