Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing

Partly because the folk memory of the pellagra epidemic has not been lost, and partly because niacin is cheap, the manufacturers of breakfast cereal now boast of how much of it they add, voluntarily, to their products. But, actually, too much is added, and if children today consumed no niacin-fortified foods, only 2.9 per cent of them would consume less than the EAR (Estimated Average Requirement). But currently 28 per cent of American children aged 2 to 8 years old ingest more than the recommended UL (upper limit) – and 2.9 per cent of children consuming less than the EAR may represent less of a public health risk than 28 per cent of them consuming more than the UL.

Other cereal supplements, too, have caused concern. Some manufacturers fortify their products with iron, and in consequence some children consume toxic amounts of it. And in consequence of that, certain countries such as Norway now ban the fortification of breakfast cereals with iron. The authors of a recent study concluded that: ‘Obtaining recommended daily allowances (RDAs) and adequate intakes (AIs) from nonfortified food continues to have the advantage of (i) providing intakes of other potential nutrients and food components, and (ii) potentially enhancing intakes through simultaneous interactions with other nutrients.’

Which in English says: ‘Eat natural, not artificial, food. Avoid breakfast cereals.’

If breakfast cereals were replaced by unprocessed, more natural foods, children would be healthier: after all, the consumption of ready-to-eat cereals is predominantly an English-speaking phenomenon, and there is no systematic evidence that non-Anglophonic children suffer for not consuming them.

The unhealthiness of breakfast cereals has long inspired humour, and in his 1975 novel Changing Places David Lodge wrote that the campus newspaper: ‘had recently reported an experiment in which rats fed on cornflake packets had proved healthier than rats fed on the cornflakes’.

And this humour is translating into consumer resistance: Euromonitor International, the marketing company, report that since 2012 breakfast cereal sales in countries such as the USA and UK have fallen by at least 1 per cent a year; and the decline is predicted to continue as consumers increasingly switch to yoghurt, fresh fruits and other protein-based, more natural, low-carbohydrate, low-sugar products.

The US Department of Agriculture continues to defend breakfast cereals as becoming ever healthier,

but consumers are, rightly, resisting the corporate message.

Breakfast cereals and Caucasians

Breakfast cereals are a largely Anglophonic phenomenon in part because they are generally served with milk, and milk is a challenge to most non-Caucasian adults: whereas 90 per cent of northern Europeans can drink half a pint of milk without feeling sick, only 40 per cent of southern Europeans and only 35 per cent of the rest of the world can do so. Milk was intended by nature, of course, to be drunk only by infants, and it contains a sugar, lactose, that can normally be absorbed with comfort only by infants because only infant guts express an enzyme, lactase, by which to digest it. Most humans lose the lactase enzyme on leaving infancy but, around 6,500 years ago, Caucasians acquired a mutation by which adults retain it. Caucasians retain the lactase enzyme because, by helping them consume animal milk, which is rich in vitamin D, it helped pre-empt the rickets that bedevilled life in the sun-deprived north of Europe.

It was at the same time, some 6,500 or so years ago, that Caucasians also acquired the mutations by which their skin turned white, the better to convert sunshine into vitamin D.

Although lactase mutations have developed independently in certain other ethnic groups, particularly in those that herd sheep, goats and cattle, the adults of most ethnic groups (the Chinese, for example) remain milk-intolerant. Cheese and yoghurt, incidentally, are the products of bacterial fermentation, which breaks down much of the lactose, which is why those foods can be eaten by adults of all ethnic groups.

Globally, there is a good correlation between national rates of milk consumption and height: thus the Dutch and Scandinavians drink the most milk per capita

and they are among the tallest people in the world (the average Dutch man now stands at 6 feet 1 inch, 1.84 metres; average Dutch woman 5 feet 7 inches, 1.71 metres). Milk seems to be good for you: it’s the cereals they dunk that do the damage.

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Myth No. 2: Breakfast is good for the brain (#ulink_6b1954b7-bcad-5373-af36-35edb1b29660)

Really? It is widely supposed that children and adolescents must do better at school, cognition-wise, if they eat breakfast, yet the conclusions of the most systematic reviews of the field are surprisingly tentative. So two comprehensive reviews of forty-five studies conducted between 1950 and 2008 concluded that eating breakfast seems to benefit the education only of children from deprived homes – and not necessarily because their brains need the morning calories but perhaps because children from deprived homes, on being lured to school by free food programmes, cannot then truant.

If the evidence for breakfast benefiting the cognition of children is weak, it is even weaker for adults. In 1992 a study from the Department of Psychology, Cardiff University, Wales, found that, though breakfast seemed to improve adults’ morning ‘recognition memory’ and ‘logical reasoning’, it impaired their afternoon ‘semantic processing’.

In 1994 the Cardiff psychologists found that breakfast improved ‘free recall’ and ‘recognition memory’, had no effect on ‘semantic memory’, but impaired ‘logical reasoning’.

So eating breakfast seems to improve some aspects of brain function yet impair others, and the general lack of certainty over what – if anything – breakfast does systematically to brain function was revealed by a 2014 review of the fifteen most careful research papers in children and adults which concluded that: ‘There is insufficient quantity and consistency among studies to draw firm conclusions.’

But researchers need not be restricted to merely observing populations, they can also do experiments, and in 2014 a group from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, published a paper with the exciting title of ‘Always gamble on an empty stomach: hunger is associated with advantageous decision making’.

Using the Iowa Gambling Task as a model for ‘complex decision tasks with uncertain outcomes’, the Utrecht team found that, when thirty university students skipped breakfast, they performed better in standard psychological tests that modelled decision-making and risk-taking. Leaders, the paper concluded, should skip breakfast.

Free school breakfasts

The first free school breakfasts were served by the School Funds Societies in Paris in 1867, and by 1890 a free breakfast programme in Birmingham, England, was providing children with ‘a substantial hunk of bread and a cup of warm milk’ before the first class. By the 1920s Norwegian schoolchildren were enjoying the Oslo Breakfast of rye biscuit, brown bread, butter or margarine fortified with vitamins, whey cheese, cod liver oil paste, a generous bottle of milk, raw carrot, an apple and half an orange, and by the twenties such government largesse was becoming typical throughout Europe.

The USA, though, remained committed to laissez-faire, private philanthropy and states’ rights, and these seem to have worked well: ‘as early as 1905 charitable religious foundations began offering free breakfasts in churches to needy schoolchildren.’

The inspirer of these initiatives was the journalist Albert Shaw, who in 1891 claimed with no evidence that ‘to drive children into school to fill their heads when they have nothing in their stomachs is like pouring water into a sieve.’

The federal government eventually sought permanent congressional authorisation for its School Breakfast Program only as late as 1975, not because the contemporary providers had failed but, rather, because their actions – and one initiative in particular – had proved too successful.

By 1970, though it had been launched only two years earlier, the Black Panther Party’s ‘Free Children’s Breakfast Program’ was feeding thousands of African-American children in church kitchens. It was also using those breakfasts to teach the Panthers’ view of black history. As Huey Newton and Nik Heynen have argued, it was not its militancy but, rather, the success of its breakfast-time educational programmes that led J. Edgar Hoover to declare that ‘the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.’

To crowd out the party’s educational programmes, the federal government understood it first had to crowd out its free eggs, bacon, grits, toast and orange juice.

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Myth No. 3: Breakfast is slimming (#ulink_4dce2b78-1b33-5d43-b072-a483568e4a7e)

Pundit after pundit asserts that breakfast produces satiety (from the Latin satis, enough). Breakfast, it is claimed, fills people’s stomachs and raises their blood sugar levels so they eat less at subsequent meals. Is this true?

There are of course peer-reviewed scientific papers that make such assertions, and a man who has written many of them is Dr John de Castro, a Texas psychologist, who in 2004 wrote: ‘we found that when individual subjects ate a larger than mean proportion of their total intake in the morning, they ate significantly less over the entire day.’

Which apparently means that the more someone eats at breakfast, the less they eat during the rest of the day. De Castro attributed this to satiety. Here is his model:

Eat breakfast → satiety → eat less at lunch → lose weight

This is a powerful model, which at first sight seems to make sense. But most scientists find the exact opposite. In a recent study David Levitsky and Carly Pacanowski of Cornell University, New York, showed that when subjects were provided with light breakfasts (approx. 350 calories) their intake at lunch was completely unchanged: i.e. those 350 breakfast calories did not cause a compensatory fall in lunch calories, so on eating breakfast their daily intake went up by 350 calories. Moreover, when the subjects ate full breakfasts of around 624 calories, they reduced their lunch calories by only about 144 calories, causing a net increase of 480 calories a day.

No wonder Levitsky and Pacanowski concluded that ‘skipping breakfast may be an effective means to reduce energy intake.’ The Levitsky and Pacanowski model is, therefore:

Skip breakfast → consume less food → reduce energy intake

or vice versa

Eat breakfast → consume more food → increase energy intake

And what made Levitsky and Pacanowski’s study so significant is that they showed that ‘these data are consistent with published literature.’ That is to say there is widespread agreement that de Castro’s satiety hypothesis is wrong and that eating breakfast increases energy intake.

Indeed, an overview of forty-seven of the most authoritative breakfast studies performed between 1952 and 2003 confirmed that around 20 per cent of children and adults skip breakfast, and that ‘breakfast eaters generally consumed more daily calories.’

So, contrary to myth, eating breakfast piles on the calories. How then do we account for de Castro’s finding that ‘when individual subjects ate a larger than mean proportion of their total intake in the morning, they ate significantly less over the entire day’?

Dramatically, Dr Volker Schusdziarra and his colleagues from the obesity clinic at the Technical University of Munich in Germany dismiss de Castro’s breakfast conclusions as a statistical illusion.

On studying a cohort of subjects, Dr Schusdziarra found that, left to their own devices, people tend to eat fairly consistently in the mornings (i.e. breakfast is a relatively fixed-sized meal, because it is a habit) but people tend to eat inconsistently later in the day: on some days (for whatever reason – Aunt Flo’s birthday party, a celebratory restaurant meal) people will eat more at lunch and dinner, whereas on other days (for whatever reason – not feeling well, being rushed at work) people will eat less at lunch and dinner.

Yet because the intake at breakfast is reasonably fixed, on the days that people ate large lunches and dinners, the proportion of their food intake from breakfast was small, while on the days they ate small lunches and dinners, the proportion of their food intake from breakfast was large. So it looks as if:

small breakfasts → large overall food intake

And

large breakfasts → small overall food intake

But these are illusions based on the greater variability of consumption at lunch and dinner, and the real model is: