Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal of the Day?

Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? The primary reason for breakfast being important is that you sleep all night and have nothing to eat for about 8-10 hours. And if you wake up hungry from sleep, breakfast will obviously be your most important meal, in terms of how it will make you feel. There are a couple of studies out there that found no connection between the weight of slim or obese people and what they eat for breakfast.

So there is not a lot of scientific proof that backs up the claim that the breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Those that eat breakfast every day tend to be healthier and slimmer. But these same people often have healthier and more active lifestyles and eat healthy overall. The breakfast is important for overall health, according to a three-year long British study called the BBP- Bath Breakfast Project, that looked at the link between breakfast and overall health of overweight people.

They found that having breakfast regularly doesn’t really cause any significant change in body weight of obese adults. But it is also found to make these people be more active in the morning, and eat less throughout the day. They studied a total of 70 adults between the age of 21 and 60, half of these were asked to eat at least 700 kcal worth of food till 11 am (and at least 350 kcal within 2 hours of waking up) and the people in the second group only had water till midday.

But they were allowed to choose what they wanted to eat, so some had sugary cereals, other had healthy high-protein breakfast. There is no doubt that the unhealthy and healthy breakfasts will affect people differently. Everyone will react differently to having or not having breakfast. And they need to look at the effects of different kinds of breakfasts. What was good about this study was that they studied the different components of the energy balance, like the energy inputs, the basic metabolism, food thermogenesis and physical activity.

It is a common belief that nobody should skip a breakfast and potentially risk putting on weight, developing a heart disease and even dying of a heart attack later on. And there are some studies that show an association between not having breakfast and coronary heart disease rather than a causal link between them. And nutritionists often love to interpret the results of these studies as “it is important to have a large and healthy breakfast to avoid obesity”. But unfortunately, there is not much out there in terms of reliable and scientific studies that supports this notion.

There is often no difference in weight loss between having and not having breakfast. The studies that claim otherwise are supported by the food industry, like Kellogg funding a study that claimed that having breakfast cereals made you thinner. And another study funded by Quaker Oats by Pepsi found that you will have more cholesterol if you do not have porridge or even better the corn flakes with added sugar. These are nothing but biased studies with conflicts of interest. If you look at it in terms of losing weight and calorie gain, have a healthy breakfast if you’re hungry and just wait till you get hungry if you don’t feel like breakfast when you wake up.

There is absolutely no reason to force yourselves or your kids to eat in the morning if you or they are not hungry. But if you’re going to work or send your kids to school it is best to have a snack ready when up for it. So is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Yes, in a way and it is better to have a bigger breakfast than a bigger dinner, but definitely not if you’re not feeling hungry. It is important to make a habit of eating healthy and smaller portions throughout the day, and eating only when you’re hungry and not having a sedentary lifestyle- being more active.

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