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?
=========
---------------
=========
---------------
