Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

We’ve all been taught that eating breakfast is vitally important to our health, to aid in weight loss, and to be able to stay focused in the morning. It’s often touted as being “the most important meal of the day.” But Aaron Carroll of The New York Times says the old adage is essentially a lie perpetrated by the food industry.

Carroll claims that the notion of breakfast’s importance is fueled by “misinterpreted research and biased studies.” He writes that in the case of breakfast being vital to maintaining a healthy weight, researchers “were consistently biased in interpreting their results in favor of a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity. They improperly used causal language to describe their results. They misleadingly cited others’ results. And they also improperly used causal language in citing others’ results.”

He notes additional misinterpretations when it came to studies about students doing better if they ate breakfast at the school. Carroll points out that these studies don’t note whether the students had adequate opportunity to eat at home. If they were coming to school hungry from the night before, he posits, it’s a no-brainer that they would perform better if they had breakfast at school, because one can’t expect students to do well if they are aren’t getting nutrition at home.

The bottom line, says Carroll, is that there is no clear scientific consensus about the value of eating breakfast. His advice? “If you’re hungry, eat it. But don’t feel bad if you’d rather skip it, and don’t listen to those who lecture you. Breakfast has no mystical powers.”

Photo of French toast with bacon & egg stack from National Post by Bonnie Stern