To Break Fast or Not to Breakfast, That is the Question

"While breakfast has been advocated as the most important meal of the day in the media since 1917, there is a paucity of evidence to support breakfast consumption as a strategy to achieve weight loss."
"[However], caution is needed when recommending breakfast for weight loss in adults [despite improved concentration and attentiveness in children who eat breakfast], as it could have the opposite effect."
New study on breakfast skipping

"The idea that early eating is essential makes perfect sense for farm labourers and small children. Whether it matters for normal sedentary adults is a different question."
"It's perfectly possible to maintain a healthy weight whether you do or do not eat breakfast. It's the overall diet that counts."
Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, New York University

"We are all unique! People should now accept that skipping breakfast is not harmful."
"People should listen to their own bodies and internal clocks and for some people this may help them lose weight."
"The key message is no one size fits all."
Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology, King's College London

Flavia Cicuttini, head of the musculoskeletal unit at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who was the senior author of this new study recently published in the British Medical Journal, herself states that: "The key message is that if a person likes to eat breakfast, that is fine." On the other hand, the key here is not what people feel like doing about breakfast; taking or leaving it, but whether, as Marion Nestle points out, these are 'sedentary' people for whom breaking the overnight fast and feeding the brain may be irrelevant.

Research demonstrates increased awareness, improved performance, sharper responses when breakfast is eaten. Think about that for a moment. And set aside the focus of that study which was weight gain with or without the consumption of breakfast. The brain requires glucose to nourish it for maximum cognition. Skipping breakfast means that the brain, more reliant than other bodily organs for energy derived from foods with a high glycemic index for good functioning, is deprived of what it needs.

Now think of people who handle large pieces of mechanical equipment requiring mental dexterity and caution. Think of a surgeon going into the operating theatre. Think of an airplane pilot, particularly of a commercial airline whose thinking and ability to act and react are sub-par because the brain has been temporarily starved; for those people and many others in such fields requiring high brain functioning, skipping breakfast doesn't seem like a very good idea.

This study viewed results from the perspective of weight gain or loss. And it's that perspective that should be stressed, but it is the wider effect of skipping breakfast and its resultant failure to feed the brain that is of infinitely greater importance to the issue. Through a meta-analysis, which means the study of a number of previous studies to gain an impression, it was found that skipping breakfast does not necessarily make people more likely to overeat during the course of the day in compensation.

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International dietary guidelines do make the claim that people skipping breakfast face a day of 'making up' by eating more, which in the end makes people gain weight. This newly-published study finds otherwise, that people who skip breakfast on average consumed 260 fewer calories daily than those who regularly eat breakfast. Breakfast-skippers, the study found, were lighter than their breakfast-eating counterparts by 0.44 kilograms.

In response, some nutritionists and specialists in obesity claim the meta-analysis (a study of studies) to be flawed since it was based on incomplete research; brief studies reaching conclusions that appear questionable. "This isn't helpful in any shape or form in the discourse around weight management or breakfast", stated Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, professor of family medicine at University of Ottawa, Bariatric Medical Institute, an expert on diet, nutrition and weight.

The team from Monash University studied 13 randomized controlled trials that undertook to compare breakfast consumption with its opposite; no breakfast. The studies were published between the years 1990 and 2018, conducted for the most part in the United States and the United Kingdom. The all-adult studies viewed the effect of eating breakfast on weight change and calorie intake and the overall picture the researchers found was that those assigned to the breakfast groups came away with a higher total daily calorie intake.

The "eat breakfast for weight loss" mantra generally accepted was premised in part on the notion that eating early in the day encourages our bodies to be more efficient in burning calories through the course of a day, but the study concluded that no differences existed in the metabolic rates between the two groups.