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Is Everything You Learned About Breakfast Wrong?

Recent studies suggest that the benefits of breakfast are not so simple.

The institution of breakfast is rarely challenged. It ranks somewhere between sleep and oxygen in reputed health benefit, and supposedly supplies irreplaceable energy to get you going, primes your metabolic system, keeps your muscles healthy, feeds your brain, and generally prepares you for the day to come. But what if the age-old wisdom is an old wives tale? Recent studies suggest that at the very least, the benefits of breakfast are not so simple.

For our purposes, breakfast means a meal eaten soon after waking, before going about one's daily business. Thus, a 2 pm meal could be considered breakfast if you've just woken up, but not if you've been awake since 8 am.

On Jan. 18, Nutrition Journal presented a study that suggests people will eat the same size meals at lunch and dinner regardless of how much they ate for breakfast. This challenges the conventional wisdom that if you skip breakfast, you'll gorge later to make up for it.

The pro-breakfast camp had earlier found support in an October, 2012 study at the Imperial College of London, which compared brain scans and caloric intake of 21 people who either ate or skipped breakfast. As Medical News Today summarized the findings: "Skipping breakfast increased hunger, appeal of high-calorie foods and food intake at lunch."

Implicit in studies like these is the assumption that we want to eat fewer calories, which is understandable given how many people consume more calories then they burn-i.e., they're overweight. But regardless of the impact, or lack thereof, that breakfast may have on total daily caloric intake, there are other factors to consider regarding breakfast-like how hungry you are, and how a meal makes you feel first thing in the morning.


Doctoral student Javier Gonzalez, part of the team, told Science Daily: "In order to lose body fat we need to use more fat than we consume. Exercise increases the total amount of energy we expend, and a greater proportion of this energy comes from existing fat if the exercise is performed after an overnight fast."

A recent study in the International Journal of Obesity, meanwhile, found that people who eat their first meal before 3 p.m. eat fewer total calories than folks who waited until afterward to break their fast. I'm not sure what that has to do with breakfast, but I guess if you were up until five eating tapas, that's about right. In any case, the researchers speculate that the relationship between the body's sleep and eating cycles could play a role in how hormones control what the body does with food in its digestive system.

Bodybuilder and blogger Martin Berkhan forced himself to eat breakfast for years, buying into the conventional wisdom that one must eat 5 to 8 times a day to preserve muscle mass. Nowadays doesn't break fast until mid-afternoon, following his daily weightlifting routine. Berkhan credits skipping breakfast for helping him not only reach his fat loss goals, but his muscle-building goals too. He calls working out on an empty stomach "Fasted Training," a practice he writes about in his blog, Leangains.


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