People Who Eat Breakfast Tend to Be Healthier—but the Meal Itself Isn’t the Reason
Decades of nutrition advice may have gotten breakfast wrong. Here’s what researchers actually want you to know about the first meal of the day.
The age-old advice that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? For most healthy adults, it’s nothing more than a myth.
The idea has survived largely because of what it overlooks. It rests on a pattern in survey data that was never proof of cause and effect. People who eat breakfast do tend to be healthier by almost every measure, but that does not mean breakfast is what makes them so.
The evidence suggests that whether a morning meal
The evidence suggests that whether a morning meal helps someone depends on the person and on other factors like hunger, schedule, and health goals.
“We have a vast amount of data from cross-sectional research, like national diet surveys, that really clearly shows that people who tend to have breakfast are consistently less overweight and more healthy by almost every metric than those who tend to skip breakfast,” James A. Betts, PhD, a professor of metabolic physiology at the University of Bath, told Inc.
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Breakfast eaters tend to do other healthy things. As a group they rarely smoke, drink less, keep saturated fat and sugar low, eat fiber, and stay active. Once those factors are accounted for, eating breakfast appears to be just another healthy habit.
Breakfast is just one hallmark of someone trying
“Breakfast is just one hallmark of someone trying to eat and live healthily,” Betts said, “rather than necessarily being a direct cause of good or improved health.”
Betts said that part of why the myth has endured is because, in the past, large surveys have attracted enormous attention, while the public rarely understands that they cannot establish cause and effect. Because health-conscious people are told breakfast matters, they keep eating it, and it keeps showing up in the data as a marker of good health.
Source: www.inc.com
