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

most do:

for once Keys told it like it probably is. Only if dieters consume a reasonable amount of protein – and take exercise – will they help sustain muscle mass.

My wife tells me, by the way, that this knowledge is widely known by personal trainers.

Resetting the metabolic and exercise rates:The Biggest Loser is an American reality television show where people compete to lose weight. Some people achieve massive weight loss (Danny Cahill, who is now 46, from Season 8, lost 239 pounds – 17 stones or 108 kg – in seven months) but, as the New York Times ran on its front page for 2 May 2016, these contestants then hit the problem of ‘adaptive thermogenesis’ (from the Greek therme, ‘heat’, and gignesthai, ‘to be born’), which is a posh way of saying that human bodies will vary the amount of energy they use.

To be anthropomorphic, our bodies do not want to lose weight: our bodies are programmed by evolution to see starvation as a terrible threat, so a body that has experienced significant weight loss will, in a response that is sometimes known as the Survival of the Fattest, save energy by decreasing its metabolic rate. And that decrease may apparently be permanent. Nor are we talking small differences: in the words of an influential study: ‘A formerly obese individual will require about 300–400 fewer calories per day to maintain the same body weight and physical activity level as a never-obese individual of the same body weight and composition.’

The Biggest Loser research study from the National Institutes of Health, on which the New York Times based its story, found that the figure was higher, around 600 calories a day.

This number of calories is almost the size of a meal, and someone who’s dieted will have to skip it permanently if they’re to maintain the same weight as someone who’s never dieted. Danny Cahill, for example, failed to do so, and he’s now 104 pounds (7 stones 6 pounds, or 47 kg) heavier than he was seven years earlier.

Although some studies fail to find adaptive thermogenesis in dieters (which in the interests of balance I note here)

, the majority do, and so we see how adaptive thermogenesis fights dieters. And, actually, it does so not only by slowing down their rate of metabolism but also by reducing the intensity of a phenomenon that is not widely recognised, namely casual exercise.

Physical activity can be monitored by portable meters or ‘accelerometers’ (the precursors of activity trackers such as Fitbits and Jawbones) and it transpires that dieters and post-dieters engage in less casual activity than their non-dieted peers: so dieters and post-dieters might take a lift rather than climb the stairs, or they might fidget less or drive short distances where once they would have walked.

Dieters and post-dieters seem, therefore, to lose the spontaneous impulse they once had to climb stairs or stretch their legs.

Adaptive thermogenesis thus offers another explanation for the paradox of breakfast skippers consuming few calories while being large: breakfast skippers will often be yo-yo dieters who (1) because of adaptive thermogenesis will burn relatively few calories, yet who (2) because of the yo-yo will be large. But it wasn’t the breakfast skipping that enlarged these people, it was the yo-yo dieting-induced adaptive thermogenesis.

Hormones: Our hormones also don’t want us to lose weight; a research group from Melbourne, Australia, found that overweight or obese subjects, on losing a significant amount of weight, demonstrate – even a year after the diet has stopped – higher levels of hormones such as ghrelin (which increases hunger) and lower levels of hormones such as leptin (which decreases hunger).

Genes: Is our weight determined by our genes or our environment? Professor Tim Spector, the twin expert from King’s College London, has found that: ‘on average identical adult twins are less than 1 kg different in weight.’

Genetics, in short, play a huge role (about two-thirds of the influence) in setting a person’s weight,

and only about a third of the influence is due to the environment.

If we diet, therefore, in Professor Spector’s words: ‘Our bodies simply seem to adapt to the reduced calorie intake and do what they are programmed by evolution to do … This is why most diets fail.’

Worryingly, weight-loss dieting might even induce weight gain. In 2012 a research group from Finland reported on identical twins where one of the twins had deliberately lost at least 5 kg (11 pounds, ¾ stone) on at least one occasion but where the other twin had never gone on a diet. And the dieters had eventually ended up, on average, 0.4 kg (1 pound) heavier than the non-dieters.

Conclusion: A group from Switzerland, on reviewing the field, has concluded that slim people should never diet: they risk eventually putting on weight. Only large people should diet: only for them might it lead to weight loss.

Dieting being unexpectedly problematic, we need to identify a strategy – a lifestyle – that allows people to lose weight and to keep it off. As we shall see, skipping breakfast will help achieve that.

8 (#ulink_a0559256-321a-5522-8de5-21d498a5912b)

Chaotic lives (#ulink_a0559256-321a-5522-8de5-21d498a5912b)

There is another explanation for the apparent paradox of breakfast skippers being large: they may be leading chaotic lives. So a Finnish study of some 5,500 16-year-old girls and boys and their parents found that breakfast skippers tend to come from families that self-harm by:

smoking

failing to take sufficient exercise

neglecting education

consuming higher intakes of high-sugar, high-carbohydrate, high-fat snacks

drinking too much

being overweight.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

Extending those Finnish findings, a study from Rhode Island of nearly 10,000 adolescents showed a significant correlation between:

breakfast skipping

fast food eating

weight gain.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

But correlation is not causation, so we need to ask, is it the breakfast skipping or the fast food eating that is causing the weight gain in these adolescents? Dr Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota has answered that question. Dr Pereira followed 3,000 young adults over fifteen years, showing that those who ate at fast food restaurants more than twice a week gained an extra 10 pounds (4.5 kg), and had a twofold greater increase in insulin-resistance than those who ate there less than once a week.

Dr Pereira therefore confirmed that fast food is dangerous food, if only because it is so high in calories: ‘a single meal from one of these restaurants often contains enough calories to satisfy a person’s caloric requirements for an entire day.’

And who eats fast food? People who lead chaotic lives. Dr Pereira divided his subjects into blacks and whites, and because – for shameful historical reasons – black Americans are disadvantaged, Dr Pereira thus also provided a link between social class and fast food. And Dr Pereira found that, fifteen years into the study:

black people were visiting fast food restaurants 2.15 times a week against 1.60 times for white people

the black people in Dr Pereira’s study had nearly two years’ less education than white people

black people took three-quarters of the exercise of white people

black people watched nearly twice as much television as white people

black people ate some 400 calories more per day than white people

black people drank 50 per cent more soft drinks than white people

black people ate 50 per cent more meat than white people

black people ate significantly less fibre than white people.

So the Rhode Island study on nearly 10,000 adolescents may have shown a significant correlation between breakfast skipping, fast food eating and weight gain, but from Dr Pereira’s research we know it’s not the breakfast skipping that is causing the weight gain, it’s the fast food. And the fast food eating and the breakfast skipping have a common root in a chaotic lifestyle, so we can begin to see how breakfast skipping and overweight are not causally linked but, rather, reflect the actions of a separate, third, cause: domestic chaos leading to unhealthy life choices:

So we can see how breakfast skipping may be associated with, but not causative of, weight gain. Breakfast skipping per se, in isolation, will promote weight loss, but if it is linked with a package of weight-gaining activities, it will then be associated with weight gain, thus leading unsuspecting epidemiologists to suppose that eating breakfast causes weight loss.

We might make a comparison with smoking and teenage pregnancy. Teenagers who smoke are more likely to become pregnant but no one has suggested that smoking causes pregnancy.

Rather, dysfunctional teenagers are more likely both to smoke and to become pregnant, but the causative agent is the dysfunction. Here is a model that captures that story:

The model is not:

dysfunctional teenagers → smoke → get pregnant