Is Breakfast actually the most important meal of the day?
And is there any evidence to back that up?
So, I’m here with Vanessa from Braincraft, and she wanted to talk about breakfast?
I love breakfast.
But recently I heard that this idea “it’s the most important meal of the day” is actually
a myth.
And it made me kind of sad.
So, I wanted to ask you, where does this idea come from?
And could it still be true?
Okay, That’s a really good question!
So let’s dive into it.
We’ve all heard this old saying about breakfast being at the top of the meal time hierarchy.
But it seems a bit counterintuitive now since breakfasts can range from a cold bowl of cereal,
to a full on omelette overload, to a hastily gulped cup of black coffee on your way dashing
out the door.
So is this truism actually true?
Well to understand this question, first we have to ask:
Why do we think that eating 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner) is the norm?
So there have been a variety of cultural norms around how many meals a person eats in the
day, and what times those meals are eaten.
For example, Native American groups encountered by early European colonists ate meals according
to food supply, availability, and season rather than being constricted to specific times of day.
And the Romans had words for all three meal times but likely only ate one heavy or large
meal a day around supper, not breakfast.
But we start to see that breakfast becomes more of a widespread practice across social
classes in Western Europe around the 17th century and the Industrial revolution,
as people start to adjust to a timed work day that was regulated by different kinds of labor.
So we start to see a shift in the 3 meals a day being espoused as the standard eating
practice (one meal early in the morning to get an energy boost, one in the middle of
the working day, and another late at night).
But even though the idea of “three hots and a cot” wasn’t always the standard,
it’s spread through our understanding of how we eat every day.
So that leads us into our next question:
What exactly constitutes a breakfast?
And when did breakfast get its own special types of food?
Well there have been a variety of breakfast fads through the years.
In the 1980s and 1990s, cold cereal sales in the U.S. hit a peak.
But the full English Breakfast, a hot meal consisting of sausages, eggs, bacon, beans,
black pudding, hash browns, fried tomatoes and mushrooms has some varied origin stories.
Some say this intense breakfast favorite goes back to people having to use up all of their
meat on Collop Monday, in preparation for not eating meat during Lent although the meal
wasn’t always relegated to the morning.
And before that many folks were resigned to eating bread, or other cheap ingredients for
their morning meal.
Up until the 1500s, breakfasts were often used in Europe to sustain the ill and the old.
And hunting parties and the upper crusts in Europe in the 18th century often had decadent
multi-course breakfast meals.
So at different points in time, certain foods were considered ideal for the morning.
But it tends to be very culturally specific.
For example, I grew up in a Jamaican family that helped me form my personal favorite breakfast
food: ackee and saltfish.
And fried fish.
And herring.
And mackerel.
Basically any kind of fish, which many folks in the U.S. relegate to evening meals,
but it’s also a very popular breakfast staple in Jamaica, although I didn’t realize this
was much of a cultural difference until I was in high school.
But then of course there’s everyone’s favorite monkey wrench/portmanteau: brunch,
when basically anything goes.
So the fact that breakfast isn’t really a fixed or special set of foods also makes
pinning down it’s importance (or lack thereof) a bit tricky, because asking a question with
the idea of breakfast already baked into it already assumes that there’s a fixed definition
of the word.
But this leads us to the meat of our question:
When did this idea about breakfast being the most important daily meal originate?
Well the definition is in its name: break fast, the meal that you use to end your unconscious
overnight fast after you wake up.
And despite there being a wide array of takes on this breakfast meal across cultures, it’s
association with being an all mighty mealtime goes back to 1917.
That’s when Lenna F. Cooper wrote, “[I]n many ways, the breakfast is the most important
meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started,” in Good Health Magazine.
But caveat: Good Health was also edited by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a physician from
Michigan who was also the co-inventor of corn flakes with his brother Will Keith Kellogg.
So this doesn’t discount the idea that breakfast could be an important meal, it just puts an
interesting twist on how we got the phrase.
Moving our timeline to the 1920s, PR expert and Sigmund Freud nephew, Edward Bernays,
was contracted by the Beech Nut Company in order to sell more of their packaged bacon.
Bernays had the company’s internal doctor send out 5000 surveys asking other physicians
if they believed a heavier breakfast was better for good health than a light one and 4500
of them replied that they agreed with his statement.
He then had his “findings” about heavy breakfasts (like bacon and eggs) published
in newspapers, which gave the whole campaign the appearance of scientific legitimacy.
This clever bit of marketing brought bacon and eggs back into fashion and added more
heft to the idea that a hefty breakfast was not only important but medically recommended.
But, now that we know where breakfast came from and where the idea that it’s
“the most important meal of the day” was generated that brings us to the second part of this puzzle.
Is breakfast actually more nutritionally valuable than any other meal?
So I can’t say that when I dove into Vanessa’s question I was expecting such a hotly debated topic.
But while some studies have shown that people who eat breakfast have lower instances of
unwanted weight gain, heart disease, and diabetes, others have argued that these studies demonstrate
a research bias already in favor of breakfast and show association, not causation.
And there’s actually some pretty important things to learn from this and a lot of it
has to do with how we understand folk wisdom vs. scientific accuracy.
So let’s bring Vanessa back to help us see if we can break this down:
First we have to ask, what is Breakfast Anyway?
In the anti-breakfast crowd there’s a sentiment that there’s no substantial proof that breakfast,
as a meal, is the key to good health.
And that’s because there’s too wide of a spectrum to say what breakfast really means.
For example: If you work an overnight shift and sleep during the day before going to work,
then your breakfast meal after you wake up may not occur until the later afternoon.
And there’s a wide variation in when people get up and when they are actually hungry,
as well as the types of foods they choose to eat.
So it may not be valid to say that just because it’s the first meal you’ve eaten in a
day that it’s substantially more important to your health and success for the rest of
your waking hours.
Next we need to exam our sources for potential bias.
Other breakfast critics note that some of these studies are sponsored by food companies,
who may not be out to “get ya” exactly, but who do have an interest in getting you
to buy their products.
So that’s why we’ve seen correlating spikes in the popularity of certain breakfast foods
(like cold cereal and protein rich foods like eggs and sausages) after sponsored studies
have come out.
And since lots of previous studies are already built upon the idea of “breakfast being
the most important meal” there’s a bias in the question asking, which may be replicated
across studies as more and more new findings cite the findings of yesteryear.
And hugely important, Correlation Does Not Equal causation.
The pro-”breakfast is the most important meal of the day” argument is basically that
even though we can’t always draw a direct causation between breakfast and improved health
outcomes (like weight loss, heart health, lower risk of diabetes, and so on) people
who eat breakfast can often have better health than those who don’t.
The problem is there are a lot of variables in here which may be skewing the pro-breakfast
bunch’s point.
Because these health benefits are not usually a one to one connection with eating food right
when you wake up.
Rather the outcomes are also drawn from the fact that if you are a person eats early,
you’re less likely to binge eat or to eat things you don’t need or want late at night.
And often people (both adults and school age children) who eat breakfast are found to have
better focus at work and school.
But this could also be associated with better nutrition overall, and less closely aligned
with breakfast as a meal.
And there are even studies suggesting that the “3 square meals a day” model might
not be best for our prolonged health.
Some studies suggest you should eat a number of small meals throughout the day, rather
than sitting down to a huge breakfast, lunch or dinner.
The truth is that rather than asking “Is breakfast is the most important meal of the
day,” we’d be better off asking: what’s the optimal nutritional and eating pattern
to achieve your goals?
Whether it’s weight loss, focus and energy, or healthy weight gain.
So how does it all add up?
Well this is probably the most ambiguous wrap up of an Origin of Everything episode to date!
Because it turns out that some of the issue is in the ambiguity of the meal itself, which
is tied to 1) what’s in it 2) what time of day it was eaten and 3) when it was eaten
in relation to when you woke up.
So while we may have reason to chow down on some healthy eats early in the day, the jury’s
still out on whether or not breakfast is the direct cause of better health.
So, what do you think?
Is breakfast a big thumbs up or a thumbs down?
Drop those comments below, or at the very least send me your favorite frittata recipes.
I’m definitely not asking for a friend.
I’m your friend.
Thanks for the question Vanessa and be sure to check out Braincraft and we’ll see you all next week!
Bye!
Hey guys!
Hope you survived past tax day relatively unscathed and stress free.
But now that we’re all cooling our jets for a couple of weeks while Uncle Sam processes
the paperwork, I wanted to shout out some of your great collective thinking on our episode
on federal income taxes.
This shout out goes to Steven Schutt on YouTube, who originally raised the question around
a point of clarity in our original video in regards to federal spending.
I jumped on that thread with our other awesome viewers: Paul Kennedy, Joshua Cooley, and
Frennis Daemon to point out that the spending I was referring to in the video was discretionary
spending and not mandatory spending (such as entitlement programs).
We edited and updated our video to reflect this distinction.
So thanks to you guys for your great work and for engaging so thoughtfully down in the
comments.
That’s it for now and keep brainstorming, and we’ll see you next week!