To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast?

That continues to be the question.  When I was growing up many years ago, we were told that breakfast was your most important meal.  The government still subscribes to this as many communities provide breakfast as well as lunch to qualifying students, subsidized with federal funds through the USDA’s School Breakfast Program (SBP).

It wasn’t too long ago that the news took the opposite view of breakfast.  Only 16 months ago I published the original To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast telling how breakfast had been declared optional based on a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.  This opinion was backed up by an earlier (Summer 2014) study reported by the Huffington Post and USA Today.

The emphasis was on whether people who were skipping breakfast to lose weight were making a good decision.  They surmised that from a standpoint of weight loss, skipping might hold a slight benefit.  If you are hungrier at lunch and eat a little more, it will usually not be enough to offset all the calories missed from skipping breakfast.  So the net intake would be favorable.

But that stance was so 2017! The latest study is in and we are back to eating breakfast as a better solution.  (I originally saw the story on a TV health segment but these two sources are available on line here and here).

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic divided 347 healthy adults into three groups, those who never ate breakfast, those who ate infrequently (one to four times a week), and those who regularly ate breakfast (five to seven days a week).  Then they followed them for 12 years and found that the breakfast eaters ended up with “smaller waistlines and were less likely to be obese.”

But the really scary part of the report came next. The “people who ate breakfast regularly only gained about three pounds over the past year. People who ate breakfast occasionally put on five pounds, while people who skipped a morning meal entirely gained eight pounds and developed dangerous belly fat.”  (Since this was a 12-year study, it is unclear why they only reported on weight gain over the past year.)  In any case, notice that the breakfast eaters did better, but on average no single group lost weight!  Isn’t it interesting that success is now defined not as losing weight, but as not gaining as much as the other guy.

After reporting on the study, each of the news sources turned to their expert who dazzled readers with such earth-shattering observations as:  people should “stick to healthier foods in the morning [and]…avoid high density, sugar-filled foods.” They should also “consider how many nutritionally empty foods they eat during the day – and then cut those out.” (Not earth-shattering after all - just common sense.) This sounds more like the dimension of discipline than any magical link between breakfast and weight loss.

This whole breakfast question, like so many others in the health-research category, is like being on an amusement park ride with abrupt corners, twists and turns only to end up in the same place we started.  Of course, no one can explain why there would be a link between eating breakfast and weight loss, so the issue is still up in the air until the next study is published.