Breakfast... Is It The Most Important Meal of the Day?

Today the majority of people in the west, believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day regardless if they eat it or not.  As we have learned from history, many times popular beliefs have been proven wrong.  So, let's look at the breakfast idea a little closer. The first question I would like to ask is, “how did we even start believing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?”  If you look at human history, people did not eat anything first thing in the morning. Even today, if you look at healthy cultures around the world, people don't eat breakfast, or if they do it's coffee or tea with something very small.  I know when I lived in Greece,  as kids we did eat something small in the morning for breakfast, but most adults never had breakfast.  If you look at cultures in Africa and South America untouched by the west you will see that none of them eat breakfast.  So how did we, in the western world, come to believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?  The answer is very simple.  Marketing!  As sad as it is, we live in a world today that with the right marketing you can get people to believe almost anything.  Is it possible that special interests are driving this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?  It wouldn't be the first time that special interest groups are trying to get us to believe something that is not true!

You hear about studies on breakfast all the time, stating how important breakfast is to your weight and health.  Here is my question?  If breakfast is so important to the human body, then how come most people are not hungry in the morning?  What?  Is their body trying to sabotage itself?    Nowadays you can find a study to prove almost whatever you want.  So let's take a closer look at these breakfast studies.

Dr. David Allison of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama and his colleagues took a closer look at breakfast studies.  What they found out after they analyzed 92 breakfast studies, published between 1994 and 2011 is that there is very little strong evidence to support the notion that breakfast makes any difference in losing weight.  Most of the studies were observational.  Simply put, the author suggested an association between breakfast and weight change based on his or her observations but there may have been other behaviors common among breakfast eaters that they did not take into account.  Many times the biases of the researcher influence the conclusions of the research.

The bottom line according to Dr. David Allison and colleagues is that there is no hard evidence that links eating breakfast with weight loss.

If this is not enough to convince you that breakfast might not be the most important meal of the day, let's look at breakfast from another point of view.  Digestion!  If you look at healthy cultures around the world, including the one that I was raised in Greece, the main meal was always eaten at a time that we could rest afterward.  In the cities within Greece, people ate a big lunch but had a 3-hour lunch break and we usually took a nap right after eating.  In the villages, where my mother is from, they did not have a break in the afternoon because they worked in the fields, so they had their main meal at dinner, where they would rest after the meal.  If you look at other cultures, the main meal is also eaten at a time when people could rest afterward.  Look at animals that eat of any significance like lions, tigers, or even our domestic dogs and cats.  What do they do after eating, they sleep or at least rest.  Think about it, how do you feel after eating a big meal?  Don't you feel like taking a nap too?  This is because when you eat a big meal (not necessarily overeating) a big part of your energy goes towards digestion.  Digestion, by the way, requires a lot of energy, that is why, naturally, your body wants to rest so digestion can take place properly.  If you eat and don't rest afterward you compromise digestion.  That is why for best digestion resting after a main meal is a very good idea, which animals know to do instinctively and all the healthy cultures around the world also seem know.

However, if you eat like a king in the morning and then go to work, that creates a problem for your digestion.  If you have stressful job, it makes it even worse because stress is not good for digestion either.  In my expert opinion, breakfast is the worse time to eat for the vast majority of adults in the western world.  I don't want to say that you should never have breakfast because there are exceptions.

Personally, I don't eat breakfast but I do make exceptions.  I believe in the 80/20 rule.  If you eat perfect 80 percent of the time, your body will forgive you for the 20 percent when you don't.