This morning, like every other morning, I didn’t eat breakfast.
I have never, ever been a breakfast person. When I wake up I’m too busy scrambling to get ready in the 20 minutes I’ve left myself after waking up late, and deeply regretting the hour I spent scrolling Reddit instead of sleeping, to think about eating.
Believe me, I’m always thinking about eating. Literally the only time I’m not thinking about eating or actually eating is for the couple of hours after I wake up in the morning. And for years, health messaging around the importance of breakfast has added yet another layer to my guilt about my diet, despite my penchant for eating Weet-Bix at other times of the day.
Apparently to be successful, you’re meant to do these 14 things before you even have breakfast. So. Much. Guilt. Post continues after video.
But a recent article in the New York Times has questioned our belief in the power of breakfast, health-wise. Aaron Carroll argues that along with a great deal of nutritional advice, our obsession with breakfast is based on biased studies and misinterpreted research.
Essentially, while there’s a substantial body of literature to support the relationship between eating breakfast and positive health outcomes, when this literature is placed under any level of scrutiny, it emerges that the findings are not so clear cut.
In 2013, a group of researchers published a study titled, ‘Belief beyond the evidence: using the proposed effect of breakfast on obesity to show two practices that distort scientific evidence. Lead by Dr Andrew Brown, they analysed all the research on breakfast and health, and came to the following conclusions.