Is Breakfast
actually the most important meal of the day? And is there any evidence to back
that up?
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 mealtime hierarchy.
But it seems a bit counterintuitive now since breakfasts can range from a cold bowl of cereal, to a full-on omelet 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 the 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 workday 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 to 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 the 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 its 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: breakfast, 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, its 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 a 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 packaging
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
they 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. 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 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-breakfastbunch’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 who 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?
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