Why breakfast is not the most important meal of the day (and possibly the worst)
You hear it all the time. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. It supposedly staves off hunger and helps you lose weight. People who eat breakfast are supposedly thinner those that don’t.
Of course, this makes no intuitive sense. Why would an “extra” meal (and its attendant calories) result in long term weight loss? Could it actually be that people who skip breakfast eat MORE calories the rest of the day than breakfast eaters?
Surprisingly, there is precious little quality evidence that eating breakfast has an effect on weight (or weight loss/gain) in any way whatsoever (perhaps because it doesn’t?). Most of the studies suggesting a weight loss benefit from eating breakfast were supported by the very companies that produce breakfast products (think Kellogg and Quaker Oats). The best study I could find showed that breakfast consumption had no effect on weight loss.
There are several major problems with studies on weight loss and breakfast consumption:
Financial bias: Breakfast food companies often support the “research”
What is “breakfast”? Cereal and milk? Eggs and Bacon?
When is breakfast? Eating breakfast at 5 am is clearly something different than eating at 10 am.
When was the last meal? Six pm, midnight?
My best advice - skip breakfast if you can. If you can’t not eat breakfast, try eating a hard-boiled egg. It will fill you for hours and has only seventy calories.