Saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is like ordering the wheels of a car in order of importance. The importance of breakfast most likely originates from the interests of a certain food industry.
As seen in the article on the recommendation to eat five meals a day, the fact that certain phrases and slogans about food and the convenience of doing things in a certain way are so deeply rooted among consumers that they are more often a response to the interests of a certain type of food industry than to a real need confirmed in the scientific literature.
The case of how breakfast issues are observed is a paradigmatic case. To the point that, on many occasions, in the brochures that the different food distributors launch with their offers (that of the supermarkets and hypermarkets) there is a specific section dedicated to “Breakfasts”. We will not find the “Lunch” or “Dinner” sections, they do not exist. At the same time, the offers that we find in this section, respond in their vast majority to ultra-processed products, normally with a significant contribution of free sugars and fats. These products usually belong, in their majority, to the ranges of pastries, biscuits, cereals, juices, soluble cocoa, etc., which, in general, their presence in our diet is usually quite inadvisable.
Breakfast, The Most Important meal of the day, Myth or Reality?
That today we should be able to make a universal recommendation about the benefits of having breakfast – or the harms of not having it – and even categorically state that it is the most important meal of the day, is completely meaningless. At least that is what the vast majority of consensuses of specialized scientific societies currently conclude. However, the volume of scientific literature that has focused on breakfast is astonishingly high. Some even argue that it is ridiculously high.
Let’s be practical, if the importance of breakfast were so obvious, there would be no need to conduct a new scientific study on the subject every so often. The most curious thing is that the disparity of results in these studies is quite evident. While some publications warn about the benefits of having breakfast, others do not find this relationship.
What we know through science about breakfast
Overall, some observational studies have found some negative associations between skipping breakfast and certain health outcomes. One from 2019 found that skipping breakfast was associated with a significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease mortality. The plus point for breakfast? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In an editorial published in the same journal, it is pointed out that, although this association is true, it was also found that the part of the population that did not eat breakfast also smoked more, drank more alcohol, was more sedentary, and had more cases of obesity… so, would it be fair to point to non-breakfast as the culprit, or at least the main culprit, of this higher cardiovascular mortality? It certainly does not seem so.
A recent review of clinical trials suggests that forcing people to eat breakfast when trying to lose weight could have the opposite effect to the desired one. So much so that, in this study I am referring to, those who were recommended to eat breakfast as a weight loss strategy consumed, on average, 260 more kilocalories per day compared to those who did not eat breakfast and still wanted to lose weight.
As a corollary, I think it is worth distilling a key idea regarding the recommendation to eat breakfast. And that is, that one should never adopt totalitarian, immovable, and universal positions regarding breakfast. In fact, and in general, all the consensuses of scientific societies conclude that the relationships between having breakfast or not having it and either weight or health prognosis are controversial and inconsistent relationships.
The origin of the myth
For this topic, it is particularly interesting to go back in time and find out what the first reference to the importance of breakfast was. It comes, without a doubt, from Lenna Frances Cooper, a pioneer woman when it came to building the foundations of modern dietetics. Lenna was the first person to hold the position of dietician for the American army and was co-founder of the American Dietetic Association (which is a benchmark today). Thus, in 1917, she published a document that said, literally: “In many ways, breakfast is the most important meal because it is the meal that starts the day.”
More than 100 years after that lapidary phrase, researchers, nutritionists, gurus, YouTubers, influencers from here and there, and even medical professionals are scratching behind their ears wondering about the scope of those words. In reality, and as seen in the previous section, it lacks consistency. But let’s continue with the origin.
The controversial phrase was published in the magazine ‘Good Health’, which at that time was the media outlet of the Battle Creek Spa. In reality, it was a famous sanatorium linked to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and whose medical director was a certain John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg’s cereal company (yes, knowing this kind of thing helps to see the puzzle in a different way). And it is that, usually, the expression that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is one of the central arguments of companies that market breakfast products.
The etymological meaning of breakfast
At this point, I think it’s appropriate to take a step back and explain what is meant by breakfast. Un-breakfast means just that, to undo, break, or cut off the fast. And in English it is literally the same: breakfast (in English, the term fast, in addition to ‘fast’ also means ‘fasting’). The “fast” that is cut usually coincides with the night’s rest. From the last typical intake of the day, dinner, until the first moment of the following day in which something is ingested. Thus, whether we eat at 6 in the morning or at 6 in the afternoon, if that is the first intake of the day, that meal will be breakfast. Therefore, unless someone intends to die of starvation, everyone eats breakfast at one time or another. In this sense, Lenna Frances Cooper’s premise for starting her famous phrase remains true, breakfast is and always will be the first meal of the day. The issue of its “importance” is another story.
What is the most important meal of the day and why?
There is no such thing as the “most important meal of the day.” They are all equally important. Making a ranking of daily intakes, and putting breakfast as the most important, would logically imply establishing a ranking from highest to lowest, which is illogical from every point of view. At least when you try to apply this ranking to everyone. Without a doubt, if someone is a professional cyclist or a worker with high physical demands, for example, it is rationally illogical to recommend that they start their performance on an empty stomach.
Thus, the central idea regarding the importance of breakfast will depend on each person’s personal circumstances. In our environment, where most people have a physically quite relaxed life, eating something in the first few minutes of the day, as soon as they get up, can be a fairly relative recommendation, and it depends more on personal tastes and predispositions than on the universal need for everyone to have breakfast.
Thus, the importance of what you eat and what you don’t eat should be viewed as a whole, with special attention being paid to making healthy choices regardless of what time of day you open your mouth to eat.
Other myths about breakfast
Beyond its “importance”, the issue of breakfast encompasses other messages that should be demystified.
Our body needs glucose to function.
This is a myth with a catch. Indeed, many of our functions are glucose-dependent, but that does not mean that we should constantly eat foods – or rather products – full of free sugars. In reality, fortunately, we live in an environment of food overabundance where there is no shortage of opportunities to eat at practically any time. At the same time, our physiology is capable of obtaining the necessary glucose through different metabolic routes and from our reserves. And the fact is that, if there is an obvious problem in relation to our nutritional (and weight) status, it is that, precisely, we do not lack reserves. Although in this case, we must appeal, again, to personal contexts: there will be people who do benefit from, and prefer, eating less frequently, compared to others who can, and wish to, reduce the frequency of their intakes.
Breakfast regulates metabolism
Another myth, and it must be said that it sounds good, is that dividing the same daily intake into several meals has two beneficial effects: on the one hand, it keeps the digestive system “running” for longer, which leads to greater energy expenditure and, on the other, it helps to regulate the cycles of hunger and satiety, avoiding the risk of compulsive eating when hunger strikes. Regarding the first aspect, science has refuted it; the energy balance remains unchanged or with insignificant differences when for the same caloric value of a daily intake this is divided into more or less occasions.
Regarding the second, we cannot help but resort to interpersonal variability again. While there are people who would rather have their hand cut off than go out without having had breakfast, others are unable or have a certain effort to eat anything in the more or less immediate immediacy of having gotten up. In the end, it is necessary to resort to the recommendation to make good food choices at the moment when you have decided to open your mouth to eat whenever.
What should you eat for breakfast?
It would be advisable to eat things that are within the best-designed food guides and leave aside those things that are not recommended to be included in our diet, no matter when we have decided to eat whatever it is. The fact that in certain societies – like ours – there are specific breakfast products does not help much to make good choices. The reality is that, when this happens, the offer of breakfast products is usually quite inconsistent with the aforementioned guides.
In countries where the so-called coca-colonization has not entered like a bull in a china shop, the first meal of the day, let’s call it breakfast, is usually made up of elements very similar to those with which, for example, dinner was made the day before. This is the case in countries such as Brazil, Japan, Romania, and Morocco. In contrast, coca-colonized countries have “breakfast” products (not foods). Even though a few decades ago, breakfasts in these latter countries also contained little or no processed foods.
So, using leftovers from other meals in the fridge could become our breakfast. At the same time, we could also prepare a mini-meal the day before with an eye on the next day’s breakfast. Rice with lentils for breakfast? Mini tomato salad and omelette for breakfast? Sautéed green beans with mashed potatoes for breakfast? Hard-boiled egg and smoked salmon for breakfast? Pasta soup and fruit for breakfast.