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

So we have to be careful: breakfast studies have been infused by industrially funded science, and we may be at the same stage in their development as cigarette studies were before 1950, when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer. Before 1950, and even for a time afterwards, that field was dominated by academic papers, sponsored by the tobacco companies, that proclaimed the health benefits of cigarettes and which then supported the subsequent advertising (‘More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette’, ‘L&M Filters are just what the doctor ordered’, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’).

Industrial money gets into surprising places. Even the great charities accept commercial funding: so Diabetes UK charges companies between £10,000 and £25,000 p.a. for using the Diabetes UK logo and name, while in 2013 at least twelve companies gave the American Diabetes Association more than $500,000. The charities do invaluable work, so they need support, and though it is perhaps a shame they solicit money from industry, they are nonetheless sensible of the risks and they implement scrupulous ethical policies. Which can be very effective. In 2013, for example, Dr Heather Leidy and her colleagues from the University of Missouri published a paper with a convoluted title: ‘Beneficial effects of a higher-protein breakfast on the appetitive, hormonal, and neural signals controlling energy intake regulation in overweight/obese, “breakfast skipping,” late-adolescent girls’. 8

And though Dr Leidy acknowledged that her study was supported by the beef and egg producer associations, she also wrote that they ‘were not involved in the design, implementation, analysis or interpretation of data’, and I believe her because Dr Leidy had actually shown that a high-protein breakfast is … bad for you! Although such a breakfast may lower your appetite later in the day, that does not compensate for the extra calories of the breakfast itself, and in Dr Leidy’s own words the net effect of eating a high-protein breakfast is that the daily intake of energy: ‘was greater ( ~ 120 kcal [calories]) compared with when breakfast was skipped’.

That effect did not reach statistical significance but the trend was sinister. For all their efforts, the beef and egg producers had funded research that showed that the healthiest breakfast option of all is to skip it! But we got there only because Dr Leidy is transparently an honest person.

The state, too, promotes breakfast. Agricultural producer groups in the USA go by unusual names such as the ‘Beef Checkoff’ or the ‘Egg Checkoff’ because they are not funded by membership subscriptions but, rather, by units sold. So every head of cattle, for example, that is sold or imported in America is ‘checked off’ for a $1 tariff. 9This is the corporate state by which the producers have harnessed legislation to tax consumers to fund, among other activities, the producers’ marketing.

The British state is as corporate. On 24 October 2015 I typed ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ into Google, and the first item came from a friendly-looking body called Shake Up Your Wake Up. SUYWU is very keen on breakfast, opening its page with ‘Apart from providing us with energy, breakfast foodsare good sources of importantnutrients such as … [words in bold in the original].’ But Shake Up Your Wake Up comes from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, which is a statutory levy board (annual budget £56 million) that promotes the interests of farmers.

To conclude, Big Business has big interests in breakfast, Big Business has the resources to fund big research, Big Business has a friend in big government, and Big Business need not descend to publishing falsities: it need only publish selectively to provide a false impression of the health value of breakfast.

In a letter to his friend John Reynolds, John Keats wrote on 3 February 1818 that ‘We hate poetry that has palpable design upon us’, but the problem with industrial science is that it can have impalpable designs on us. Caveat emptor .

I’ve presented a bleak view of industrially funded research, yet industry may sometimes be the only source of money for the investigation of unconventional truths. As Nina Teicholz chronicled in her 2014 book The Big Fat Surprise , 10by the 1960s the governmental and charitable funding agencies were so convinced that dietary fat was the cause of atherosclerosis that a heroic dissenter like John Yudkin, the author of the anti-sugar pro-fat 1972 book Pure, White and Deadly , was cornered into asking industry to support his heterodox research because no one else would. 11The ruthless leader of the dietary fat consensus, Ancel Keys, could then use that industrial support to smear ‘Yudkin and his commercial backers’. 12

In his 1776 Wealth of Nations Adam Smith argued that markets tend to be more open to new ideas than are universities or government agencies, which was echoed by Friedrich Hayek in his 1944 Road to Serfdom , where he showed how new entrants fructify markets with innovative ideas. My own 2008 book Sex, Science and Profits re-emphasised the innovative value of commercial science in challenging received wisdoms. 13

In his recent book Pharmaphobia , moreover, Thomas Stossel, a Harvard University professor of medicine, argues that only if university medical scientists work closely with industry – a closeness that will inevitably be rewarded with consultancy fees – will medical innovation be optimised. 14

Ultimately it is for the readers of a scientific paper to determine for themselves if they believe it has been biased by its funding source, and such matters of judgement cannot easily be codified.

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