Terence Kealey - Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal - Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing

The Mediterranean breakfast: Judging by the longevities of the people who eat it, the Mediterranean diet is healthier than that of northern Europe or North America, and in his 2003 book Food in Early Modern Europe Ken Alabala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific, California, notes that in southern Europe breakfast never really developed: ‘In countries where the evening meal was larger, breakfast did not become important. In southern Europe it is still not a proper meal, but merely coffee and perhaps a piece of bread or pastry. In England and the north [of Europe] the pattern was quite different.’ 29

As a group of senior Italian nutritionists wrote in 2009: ‘Every morning, most [Italian] adults just drink a cup of coffee or a cappuccino.’ 30

Yet as the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the CIA have all confirmed, the Italians live longer than either the British or the Americans. 31That doesn’t, of course, prove that breakfast is bad for you, but it does weaken the suggestion that good health is impossible without it.

Overview: When, in Tudor times, the European aristocracy ceased to skip breakfast, certain wise contemporaries expressed alarm. In 1542 the celebrated physician Andrew Boorde wrote in his Dietary of Health that ‘A labourer may eat three times a day but two meals a day are adequate for a rest man.’ 32

Why? Because, Boorde said, ‘repletion shortens a man’s life.’ 33Equally, in his Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health of 1602, 34the scholar William Vaughan advised us to:

‘eat three meals a day until you come to the age of 40 years,’ 35

which was echoed by Sir John Harington (1560–1612):

‘feed only twice a day when you are at man’s age.’ 36

As we’ll discover, breakfast is dangerous because it is eaten when the body is most insulin-resistant, and, as we’ll also discover, the people who are most at risk of insulin-resistance are those who are over 45 years old and physically inactive. We might do worse than recapitulate the sixteenth-century wisdom of Dr Boorde and others.

Our best guide to breakfast may be Franz Kafka, who in his 1915 book Metamorphosis described how ‘for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day.’ 37This description is often invoked by pro-breakfast scientists, 38but their confidence is misplaced because the full quote is: ‘The washing up from breakfast lay on the table; there was so much of it because, for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and he would stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers.’ Kafka is actually telling us that Gregor’s father is a jerk, who won’t work to support his family but who will nonetheless lash out at Gregor, the family breadwinner.

And with that image of breakfast as the meal of moral degenerates, I shall end this review of its history.

An article published in 1917 in Good Health , the self-proclaimed ‘oldest health magazine in the world’, reiterated that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ 1and Good Health was edited by Dr John Kellogg. So here’s the worry. Type the popular mantras into Google today, and you discover that many of the studies asserting them are supported and funded by the manufacturers of breakfast cereals.

As a simple experiment, on 24 October 2015 I typed ‘breakfast’ into Google Scholar and downloaded the first ten papers that were medical or biological and which were fully accessible online. Of those ten papers, would you like to guess how many were funded, at least in part, by Kellogg, General Mills, Nestlé or some other food company? The answer is given in the footnote. fn1

Breakfast is big business: global breakfast cereal sales are expected to reach $43.2 billion annually by 2019, up from $32.5 billion in 2012, and the North American market alone was worth $13.9 billion in 2012. But that North American market is now mature, which is why manufacturers now target the emerging world. 2Of course they do: the breakfast cereal business is a great business; the raw product (grain or rice) is cheap but the final product on the supermarket shelves is not so cheap.

The fast food breakfast market is also big and growing. Dominated by McDonald’s, it was worth $31.7 billion in 2012 in North America, and between 2007 and 2012 its sales increased by 4.8 per cent annually. 3Fast food = meat = protein, and that message is now so strong that Kellogg’s has entered that market, to sell Kellogg’s Special K Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich Sausage, Egg and Cheese. 4These sandwiches, which are designed to be microwaved at home, look to English eyes like hamburgers. They are so small as to each deliver only 240 calories, but each sandwich also delivers 820 mg sodium (over 2 g of actual salt) which is a third of the daily recommended intake, and as most people would eat two Flatbread Sandwiches for breakfast, they will not only have consumed a gratuitous meal, they will also have consumed two-thirds of their daily allowance for salt before leaving the house in the morning. 5Still, the packet boasts a pretty photograph of two slices of orange placed alongside the Kellogg’s Special K Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich Sausage, Egg and Cheese.

Research funded by companies tends to produce results that are favourable to those companies: there will rarely be actual dishonesty on the part of the scientists, but nonetheless a bias can creep into the published findings. Consider the pharmaceutical industry. There is a class of drugs known as ‘calcium-channel antagonists’ that are prescribed for heart disease, and over the years at least seventy clinical studies on these drugs have been published by university professors and practising doctors. Some of those studies were funded by the manufacturers, while others were funded by independent sources including charities, government research agencies and hospitals, and in 1998 a group of investigators from the University of Toronto found: ‘A strong association between scientists’ opinions about safety and their financial relationships with the manufacturers. Supportive scientists were much more likely than critical scientists to have financial associations with the manufacturers.’ 6

University professors and practising doctors, therefore, publish findings that support their sources of research money. Repeated surveys of scientists’ publications have confirmed this finding, which is why journals now require the authors of papers to list their sources of research income and consultancies. Yet such listings can still leave the reader adrift: does an industrial association negate a researcher’s work, or can they be trusted anyway?

The food and drinks companies will also manipulate publication. David Ludwig is a hero in the battle against obesity. He is a professor of paediatrics at Harvard and an author of the 2007 book Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World . He is also an author of a study that found that research papers that have been funded, at least in part, by the drinks manufacturers are four to eight times more likely to report good news about commercial drinks than those that were funded independently. No research paper, moreover, that was funded wholly by the drinks manufacturers reported any bad news. fn2Since so many papers on drinks are funded by the manufacturers, Ludwig concluded that the whole field of study has been biased. 7