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

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Terence Kealey 2016

Diagrams redrawn by Martin Brown

Cover image © Keenan

The right of Terence Kealey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It should be used to supplement rather than replace the advice of your doctor or another trained health professional. If you know or suspect you have a health problem, it is recommended that you seek your GP’s advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. This publisher and the author accept no liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008172367

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008172350

Version: 2017-04-27

To my wife, Sally

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Preface

PART ONE: My Story, Episode

1. My diagnosis

PART TWO: The Dubious Advocates of Breakfast

2. The glorification of breakfast

3. Breakfast in an age of commercial science

PART THREE: Breakfast Myths

4. Myth No. 1: Breakfast cereals are healthy

5. Myth No. 2: Breakfast is good for the brain

6. Myth No. 3: Breakfast is slimming

PART FOUR: The Breakfast Paradox

7. Yo-yo dieting

8. Chaotic lives

9. Five breakfast sagas

PART FIVE: Breakfast Wars

10. The Harvard and Cambridge challenges

11. The heroic breakfast guerrillas

PART SIX: Misleading Experiments

12. Blood glucose and breakfast: the unhealthy majority

13. Blood glucose and breakfast: the healthy minority

14. Why have the scientists claimed breakfast to be safe?

PART SEVEN: How Breakfast Kills Us

15. The fat saga

PART EIGHT: Insulin, the Great Traitor

16. The carbohydratisation of the English-speaking breakfast

17. Nothing about breakfast makes sense except in the light of insulin

18. Diabesity, the big new disease

19. Insulin-resistance, the modern plague

20. Definitions

21. The dawn phenomenon

22. The biochemists have been warning us for nearly a century that breakfast is dangerous

PART NINE: Skipping Breakfast: Personal Stories

23. My story, episode 2

PART TEN: How Insulin Kills Us

24. What a modern plague looks like: the metabolic syndrome

25. Can we reverse the metabolic syndrome?

26. The new fasting diets

27. Type 3 diabetes (and other consequences of the metabolic syndrome)

PART ELEVEN: If You Must Eat Breakfast, What Must You Eat?

28. So, what to eat?

29. And if you must eat breakfast?

Envoi

Afterword

Footnotes

References

Illustration Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

I was contracted to submit the first draft of this manuscript to my publishers on 31 January 2016. The day before, on 30 January, The Times trailed on its front page an article by Angela Epstein, a health journalist, entitled ‘Eight great weight-loss myths’. Skipping breakfast was myth number four:

A recent study by Louisiana State University found that a 250-calorie serving of oatmeal [porridge] for breakfast resulted in reduced calorie intake at lunch.

Some people like to do the crossword, but my morning hobby is to find the catch in claims that breakfast is good for me, so where was this article’s catch? I had twenty-four hours in which to uncover it.

It wasn’t hard to locate the study, which had just been published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition , where I discovered that it had actually come jointly from Louisiana State University and PepsiCo (which owns the Quaker Oats Company). 1That is obviously a different provenance than from Louisiana State University alone.

The study showed, moreover, that, compared with a breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios, a bowl of Quaker Instant Oatmeal slightly reduced the amount eaten subsequently at lunch; but the study did not compare subjects who ate a bowl of Quaker Instant Oatmeal with those who’d actually skipped breakfast, because no subjects were asked to skip it. Why not?

Well, it so happens that, contrary to what most people believe, eating breakfast significantly increases your total intake of calories: though eating breakfast may reduce your calorie intake at lunch, the calories you consume at breakfast will greatly exceed the ones they displace at lunch. So a fuller Times report of the study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition might have read:

A recent study by Louisiana State University that was funded by – and performed jointly with – PepsiCo (which owns the Quaker Oats Company) found that a 250-calorie serving of oatmeal for breakfast resulted in a slightly reduced calorie intake at lunch compared with an equivalent serving of Honey Nut Cheerios. Eating any cereal, however, greatly increases the total daily calorie intake, and only if breakfast were actually skipped would the total calorie intake have fallen.

That little story summarises this book.

Every morning Providence provides us with a precious gift, the gift of fasting. Overnight we digest the food we’ve eaten the day before, and by morning our metabolism has transitioned from feeding to fasting mode.

Fasting is a wonderfully healthy state. When we fast, our insulin levels fall, as do our blood sugar, triglyceride and cholesterol levels. Most usefully, when we fast, we lose weight. But what do too many of us do on waking? We break that lovely gift of fasting – we literally breakfast – and we eat, so courting type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, strokes, hypertension, dementia and cancers of the liver, breast, pancreas and uterus.

Breakfast damages us in at least four different ways. First, it increases (not decreases) the number of calories we consume. Second, it provokes hunger pangs later in the day. Third, it aggravates the metabolic syndrome, which is the mass killer of our day, which – fourth – is further aggravated by the fact that breakfast is generally a carbohydrate-laden meal.