The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'.
This is honestly just a low-quality, cherry-picked opinion piece by someone who really doesn't like breakfast.
Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it.
(a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the effect of breakfast on obesity to look specifically at this issue. They first noted that nutrition researchers love to publish results showing a correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity.
(b) However, they also found major flaws in the reporting of findings. People 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.
(c) Few randomized controlled trials exist. Those that do, although methodologically weak like most nutrition studies, don’t support the necessity of breakfast.
(d) Further confusing the field is a 2014 study (with more financial conflicts of interest than I thought possible) that found that getting breakfast skippers to eat breakfast, and getting breakfast eaters to skip breakfast, made no difference with respect to weight loss. But a 1992 trial that did the same thing found that both groups lost weight. A balanced perspective would acknowledge that we have no idea what’s going on.
(e) Many of the studies are funded by the food industry, which has a clear bias. Kellogg funded a highly cited article that found that cereal for breakfast is associated with being thinner. The Quaker Oats Center of Excellence (part of PepsiCo) financed a trial that showed that eating oatmeal or frosted cornflakes reduces weight and cholesterol (if you eat it in a highly controlled setting each weekday for four weeks).
Your comment however, reads exactly like you describe his, but for the opposite preference.
Exactly because the sense of hunger is not correlated with the exact need to eat is that we have obesity.
Eating only when hungry sounds like a good idea but then you get (usually fat) people complaining they are hungry all the time.
An average adult will spend around 12h (and probably more) physiologically fine without food, until its glycogen reserves are depleted.
In terms of "consume" in general, there is an intense commercial pressure to get you to "consume" more. Oddly you don't see ads pressuring you to eat lunch or eat dinner, although Taco Bell used to advertise "fourthmeal" for a while.
The disconnect between hunger and the need to eat may be an artifact of the separation of flavor from nutrition in modern, engineered "foods". To me it seems that hunger must have evolved as a fundamental signal to do or not do exactly what it's about (eat) but that it's been disrupted by modern developments.
Those people have no idea what is like to be actually hungry -- in the literal, haven't eater for 2 days sense.
They just have cravings.
You've also neglected to mention (f), where the author discusses studies that show that breakfast is beneficial to children and then handwaves both of them away:
> What about the argument that children who eat breakfast behave and perform better in school? Systematic reviews find that this is often the case.
and
> It has been found that children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight than children who eat two breakfasts.
> One of the reasons that breakfast seems to improve children’s learning and progress is that, unfortunately, too many don’t get enough to eat. [...] It’s not hard to imagine that children who are hungry will do better if they are nourished.
Seems a pretty valid point as opposed to handwaving. Nutrition research in general has a pretty studious history of ignoring results in an attempt to support pre-existing conclusions.
For support of last statement, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-ration (side note: military nutrition has a long and interesting involvement with civilian nutrition guidelines)
Here's the thing though: he has every scientific and methodological right to do so.
It's those making a claim (that breakfast is good) that have to prove it.
If they fail to provide evidence for their claim, those who like the author merely point out that their research is weak don't have to prove breakfast is neutral.
What if overweight children are more likely to skip breakfast?
With the attention paid to this topic, if no causal relationship has been found, then it does imply (though not conclusively) that in most circumstances breakfast does not have any strong, meaningful beneficial (or magical) effect.
However, the skipped breakfast was not the cause of my overweight, but simply the result of eating far too much in the evening. So maybe there actually is a correlation, but as always: Correlation does not imply causation.
And that's almost exactly what this post suggests:
> The bottom line is that the evidence for the importance of breakfast is something of a mess. 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.
> people have different metabolisms and if you are hungry in the morning you should eat and if you are not you shouldn't
Bodies don't always cooperate, if you are going to exercise strenuously in a given day you had better eat some kind of breakfast whether your body feels like it or not.
Breakfast is always going to be the opportunity to eat when you have more of the day ahead of you. That's true by definition, and it's the principle behind the chestnut about it being the most important meal of the day. There isn't much more to it than that.
Or what? As someone who has undertaken week long fasts while participating in competitive sports with no discernible performance difference, I'm skeptical. Your body doesn't "run out of fuel" because you haven't eaten for 12 hours.
Everyone is different. These rules of thumb, including breakfast being extra special, are silly.
I've done many multi-day hikes and a 24 mile one-day hike. I can confirm that eating breakfast before setting out in the morning is absolutely crucial. Like the old saying goes, an army marches on its stomach.
I'm normally not hungry in the morning, so this was a challenge. The few times I did skip breakfast on these hikes, I had to stop half-an-hour in to correct my mistake, as I felt completely drained.
Shockingly, people are different. I much prefer a snack on the trail to breakfast before.
Just like drinking when thirsty is drinking too late.
Its more like "I don't eat breakfast, because I'm not hungry at that time". In your haste to paint the author as biased, you ended up sounding the same.
It seems that your comment is equally handwavy :)
As a casual observer of this topic, it seems like breakfast is necessary for humans who want to grow: kids and people adding muscle mass.
If you want to lose weight or maintain breakfast can probably be skipped.
There is a very large following of Intermittent Fasting in the bodybuilding community. Tens/hundreds of thousands of consistent weightlifters who do not eat breakfast or lunch and put on impressive mass. Your body doesn't care about daily fluctuations, calories in/calories out, count your macros. Fin.
So I disagree with your casual conclusion.
For example, not being overweight is good for you. The existence of people who survive famine because they started out obese doesn't disprove that.
For instance, if you have to get to work at 5am, are you better off waking up earlier to eat breakfast? In this case, the cost of lost sleep may be greater than the benefit of breakfast.
The NYT article points out that many of the studies that claim breakfast is good may be flawed. If that's true, then we are likely overestimating the benefit of breakfast. And that means that in many cases where we thought
perceived_benefit(breakfast) > cost(breakfast)
it could actually be that
real_benefit(breakfast) < cost(breakfast)
Can you apply the same logic there?