Impact of breakfast skipping compared with dinner skipping
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Basic common sense indicates that it would be highly unlikely that anything of value could possibly be learned. The variability between people, meals, state of their lives, backgrounds, habits, behaviors, schedules, etc must be staggering.
Scientists will never admit to this but about 95% of published research, just like the one above, are more like practice runs where they are honing the skills of doing the research. Right down to writing papers.
There should be nothing wrong with practicing, alas since you can't get funded for practicing and training - everyone has to always be bullshitting each other how they are producing new insights.
Where did you get 95% from anyway? This limited study has more evidence for its conclusion than you do for making the statement "Scientists will never admit to this but about 95% of published research..."
Big Science in nutrition, diet, and exercise is a grift. If the researcher is not also a practitioner (e.g. body builder or losing lots of weight) you can usually ignore the results.
Also ignore any studies involving mice, food questionnaires or other self-reporting, meta-analyses..
What's "Big Science"? You are also claiming it's all a scam? Every scientific study related to diet, nutrition, and exercise?
"If the researcher is not also a practitioner (e.g. body builder or losing lots of weight) you can usually ignore the results."
Why do they have to practice some fitness or nutritional art to study it? Wouldn't that make them more bias if they did?
"Also ignore any studies involving mice, food questionnaires or other self-reporting, meta-analyses.."
Why? Many times in the past people have stated that mice and other rodents aren't ideal subjects in studies that relate to humans but that doesn't appear to be the case
https://www.livescience.com/32860-why-do-medical-researchers...
And another article states 'Nobel-winning scientific achievements such as the discovery of vitamin K, the development of the polio vaccine, the invention of monoclonal antibody technology now used for cancer treatment, and the unravelling of how neurons talk with each other in the brain all would not have occurred without mice."
https://www.blood.ca/en/research/our-research-stories/resear...
Pretty much. All the mouse stuff, self reporting, and meta-studies and you're already at what, 90-95%?
> Why do they have to practice some fitness or nutritional art to study it
Skin in the game and incentives besides "increase # of studies/citations" and "get grant money."
Discovering vitamins was great, same for vaccines and probably monoclonal antibodies. I don't know anything about monoclonal antibodies.
What I do know is that Big Science knows 0 about diet (fat loss in particular) and exercise. They're not even wrong, they're just so insulated from reality that they're in the wrong ballpark.
How do you know this?
I also know that many of the things they say or used to say that are still standard doctrine are just flat-out wrong, which I've confirmed in my own experiments.
Look at the cholesterol and fat-related "common wisdom" they promoted for decades: saturated fats bad, animal fats bad because cholesterol, etc.
Meanwhile I looked at my biochemistry textbook where the biosynthetic pathway for cholesterol began with Acetyl-CoA, which means that almost everything can be a precursor for cholesterol in the organism, be it carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, anything. The corollary for this is that should you want to reduce your cholesterol levels, a more appropriate course would have been to lower your calorie intake and perhaps a strategy to block cholesterol reabsorption on the digestive tract (the enterohepatic cycle) than just seeking a "low-fat" diet.
Today this perception was corrected, but it was sacred dogma for decades despite it conflicted with the basic facts of human biochemistry.
And since bad medicine dies one physician at a time, I know diabetics who were warned about saturated fat literally THIS WEEK. So the mistake might've been corrected in that it's not taught as dogma any more, but it'll take another 20-30 years for physicians to stop doling out this misinformation. To a diabetic, nonetheless.
Also, what they tested is having no fixed eating schedule. The effects (if any) of skipping breakfast every day consistently are not measured.
Frequently they don’t manage to make it past the first couple levels because the results aren’t interesting.
There is a real benefit in having fewer pieces of junk to sort out and so many of these medical research studies are just noise that well meaning members of the public cite and adopt into practice because they don't know any better.
It's the modern day version of leeches, essentially.
Is part of "well meaning members of the public" just as "YouTube commentary" is and "random celebrity that Googles something and repeats it on Twitter."
And quite frankly, so are scientists themselves. I have met far, FAR too many scientists that do not know the very first thing about statistics and yet feel competent to reference other people's research.
This is why I say it's a big pile of leeches for more than half this stuff. Sure the incentives are misaligned, sure its reporting, sure this and that. But what we really need here are people to say "no you idiot leeches don't do dittly squat to fix this problem."
This study did the former:
> The duration of the study is 7 days including 3 days with controlled diet and 4 days (including 5 nights) in a metabolic chamber at the Institute of Nutritional Medicine at the University of Hohenheim.
I imagine it was prohibitively expensive to have more participants.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
If you are ok with a 25% margin of error and a 95% confidence level, 16 people is good enough. You have to make sure there isn’t some skew in your population, but if your method of sampling the population produces a skew, adding people won’t really help there.
I think that skipping a meal every once in a while, and regularly skipping meals according to a specific pattern for one, two or ten years, are completely different activities with very different outcomes
Power and sample size are determined by numerous factors depending on the question under study. You could have N=10 be statistically powerful and N=1,000,000 be statistically meaningless. It depends ENTIRELY on the subject under study. More is not always better and in many cases completely unnecessary.
https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704_Power/B...
Here is a decent guide. You may wish to read it so you can learn when you can dismiss a study based on N. You never mentioned, did you back out the study numbers and determine the N=17 number was outside the range of statistical power? If so, would you mind posting your calculations?
> These comments are always so hilarious. It demonstrates a significant lack of understand of how statistics actually works.
I do have a PhD, but thank you for your input anyway.
This is a lay forum - a place more suited to the discussion of decided science.
This comment is extremely funny.
I heard a rumour that the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition might be aimed at scientists working on clinical nutrition, who could make meaningful use of this result - and not the readers of Hacker News.
What I'm saying is, if some rando on HN can see see that the trial size is too small to be statistically significant how did it pass peer review?
However, it is too small and insignificant for Hacker News readers to make meaningful use of, and it would be incorrect for them to read anything into the results presented. That is the difference.
I agree that what is missing is to measure skipping meals for a longer time period, like a month, at least.
Right now, I'm 1/2 taller, ~70 lbs lighter, I have ~10 lbs more LBM, blood pressure and blood work is spot on. He's got high blood pressure, and is diabetes adjacent.
I have a good friend who's an identical twin who did CFR (over 30 years, now); similar situation.
Here's the summary: getting fat is bad; losing fat is bad; being fat is deadly.
The healthiest thing to do is just never be fat in the first place.
Of course, it's not as black and white here, but sample size and effect size should be considered in relation to each other. Previous research and theoretical expectations should also play a leading role.
That is not what I was expecting this to be about. Now I'm thinking, how does this relate to the intermittent fasting trend?
Are people meal skipping and calling it intermittent fasting?
Or are the people who are meal skipping generally not interested in "wellness community" trends like IF?
First sentences of the introduction.
> In conclusion, a causal role of breakfast skipping for the development of obesity is not supported by the present data.
Last sentence of the paper.
Yes, including when they snack all the time.
E.g. Eat Stop Eat, where IIRC you eat normally every other day, and then you eat only 500kcal or so on the alternate days. So that might be done by skipping a meal every other day.
Other people do a daily fasting/feeding window, e.g. 16/8 up to 23/1. The latter basically means you eat only 1 meal a day (unless you somehow manage to eat 2 "meals" within one hour) whereas 16/8 typically means skipping breakfast or dinner.
Yet other schemes are 3 days eating/1 day fasting. Still an "intermittent fast."
I think IF basically just means "any deviation from the standard 3 squares a day eating pattern."
I believe them that this is correct but does anyone know why? I thought all the "intermittent fasting" folks were losing weight?
Here's a review of related RCTs that comes to the opposite conclusion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8469355/
Looking at the linked studies that went for more than a week, we have this one for instance that appears to show good results for IF:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6682944/
Except it’s a trial on 10 people in an already severly pathological situation. That might apply to some of us, but it’s far from a generic study.
Or this one, which reports memory issues from IF (an also only targeted subjects with obesity)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7146388
Or this one, which showed improvement through the trial, but with no significant distinction between the two method tested, which could mean the effect could be from the observation of the subjects themselves:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29778565
Most of the study were interesting, but no brazing praise of IF really.
Not at all scientific, just 2 cents.
In my Experience, the best combo is One should stop eating by 6pm, and have 8-10oz of plain water between 6pm and 8pm...
//not a health expert, but my own experience this is not medical or nutrition advice...
Also, one event of skipped dinner and winding up at, like, 1500 calories for the day can result in normal eating the next day for me if I drink an extra heavy amount of water. But I have to be conscious about it.
In general for me skipping and intermittent fasting is extremely unpleasant and ineffective. Eating 400-500 calories every 3-4 hours- 1800-1900 in all- is far more scalable and enjoyable to maintain or lose a little.
I do believe that extended fasts can be good (for me) but I can't do them and participate in any activities, whether family or work or whatever. An extended fast would need to be a solo week vacation.
On a more keto/low-carb style diet it's a much different experience, for me.
At the beginning I had the same issues as you, and arrive at meal time craving for food.
After the second week though the cravings started to disappear and with it the issue of overeating on that meal. I still eat more on that single meal than in the past, but not that much.
Every person reacts in different ways, but my guess is that when the body is used to continuously process food skipping a meal is a big deal, while in the other case is just part of the routine.
So, it sounds like short-term fasting is a good way to stress the system. Long-term stress might lead to bad outcomes though?
Kind of like working out is good, but only if you give the body enough time to overcompensate between workouts.
E.g. if you snack on sugary stuff every few hours, your body will quite literally never get blood glucose under control except during your sleep, which is basically the definition of Type 2 diabetes.
> I believe them that this is correct but does anyone know why?
This would have been better written as "Because the modern lifestyle may lead to obesity, meal skipping has become increasingly popular".
If you gain 20 pounds, then you need to eat more relative to your previous weight in order to maintain your current weight (including that extra 20 pounds). If you lose 20 pounds, you have to eat less to maintain that new weight.
If, on the other hand, you manage to eat a lot of calories without activating certain biochemical switches (like one poster here mentions), you can build a lot of muscle without gaining too much fat. Some bodybuilders achieve this (allegedly even without steroid use).
The body is a dynamic system even before lean body mass changes come into play, on the order of 2-3 days.
I also scanned through the comments looking for this poster you say who talked about eating without activating certain biochemical switches, but was unable to find it. Where is this purported comment?
I was referring to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383428
I did OMAD (one meal a day) for a while and when I was researching it, many places encouraged this behavior. The idea being that if you skip 2 meals, even if you eat like garbage for your one meal, you won't be able to eat as many calories. This worked for me, I ate whatever I wanted for dinner and I lost ~20lbs in a month, but my cholesterol levels increased so I put a stop to it. Then, I put the weight right back on because, well, I never actually changed my eating habits -- only the frequency.
It is a process for caloric reduction, if you skip 3 eggs in the morning, but then eat 6 eggs plus a sandwich at lunch you are not going to lose weight.
Normally while doing Intermittent fasting, you need to fast for 16 hours or more (not the 8-12 that meal skippers normally get) and often Intermittent fasters will do a single sensible meal and then snack with low carb snacks during the rest of the eating period.
There are those who these diets work for, and some of those near religiously insist that it's simple and it should work for everyone and that if it isn't working then that's probably down to some personal failing. But the truth is that this is a pattern and it's not specific to any given diet, and it's not necessarily down to someone doing something wrong. For all that we think we know about diets, fat and weight - we haven't quite cracked weight loss and it's certainly not as simple as measuring calories in/out.
It sorta suggests that obesity isn’t one of the main costs in the US for healthcare (I suspect it isn’t) and that there isn’t a pill that will ”fix” obesity (I suspect there isn’t)
With a smaller eating window (e.g. less than or equal to 8 hours in a day), there is a greater likelihood that less food will be consumed. This relies on CICO (ie. calorie consumption being less than TDEE). I read the linked abstract but there was no mention of number of calories consumed by the test subjects; I estimate that this would be the most critical factor with regard to weight loss.
As far as the claimed likelihood for type 2 diabetes, it seems to run counter to everything I've read about IF. When a person restricts their eating to a smaller window of time, their body's insulin resistance decreases, thereby lowering the likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.
I work from home, we home school kiddo. That means they're not up and around until 11am or noon.
For me, I fall out of bed and jump on Zoom meetings, because I'm in a different time zone from most of my team. I don't get clear of meetings until around noon, when I can eat. My family's late schedule keeps me up late, hence falling out of bed and into Zoom.
Probably not the healthiest, and definitely not "intermittent fasting" with deliberation.
The fiber is most important, to provide some grist for your digestive system. The fat quenches some hunger and allows you to put off your next meal/snack with less discomfort. A little sugar provides some early energy.
- infusion: ginger + mint + lemon + green tea (or yerba mate)
- fruit: banana or dried fig
- seeds: slice of whole grain bread or almonds or any else you like, vary
- eggs with spices and herbs
- vegies with lot of fiber or veggies pasta
- minutes later: infusion: ginger + mint + lemon + green tea (or yerba mate)
- toast with eggs and lot of different spices and herbs, put anything you got
- infusion: what ever you want without caffeine, example: ayurvedic infusion
no sickness, no covid, no tired, fully awake, perfect for hunting propaganda online, every day, all day long, just read my post history, it enhances the mind and your senses
No meat, no added sugar, no added salt, no transformed food, no fridge, just spices and herbs
Europeans sometimes have patterns of eating yogurt or quark, typically with fruit slices and muesli. On the other hand I have a bunch of Dutch relatives, they mostly eat untoasted bread spread with butter and topped with either a meat or cheese or sprinkles (fruity sugar sprinkles or chocolate sprinkles or bigger chocolate flakes).
The classic American southern farmer's breakfast was biscuits and gravy. The biscuits are fluffy and bready while the gravy is a white sausage gravy, rich, milky, buttery, peppery, with chunks of sausage. Libby's makes a good can of this stuff, but you should add some cayenne or hot pepper flakes or both. "Sticks to your bones" while you go out to the fields, I think there's something to the refined grains of the biscuits giving you short-term energy so that you don't feel bogged down, while the oils and meats set you up to have longer-term energy as the day winds on.
You're asking about food but maybe I'd mention something about patterns... Back when I was a Tibetan Buddhist I got to know some monks. Apparently the ancient history of mendicants in India was that they'd go door-to-door begging for whatever food the people in their neighborhood would offer them. Now, in the present day, where conditions are different -- the monks "beg" from the monastery which is staffed by lay practitioners who manage the money and purchase food and so forth.
But a lot of the monastic rules simulate that earlier lifestyle. For example, the monks I met were not allowed to sleep on any sort of mattress, because the earlier mendicants slept on the ground outside. And where this gets interesting is that they also have to eat all their food by noon, "otherwise we'd have no time for meditation." (We also speculated that maybe Indian mendicants didn't want to be perceived as greedy, so if they could get a solid meal maybe they didn't push their luck.) I think this only applied to solid foods -- Tibetans traditionally drink a butter tea, which is exactly what it sounds like, tea leaves that we'd regard as way-way-way oversteeped, churned together with yak butter and salt, and I think they were allowed to drink this in the afternoon. Similarly I think a bowl of broth would have been okay for dinner as long as it didn't have solids in it?
But yeah, suggests a large population of folks living for a long time without dinner, and I think I even have a vague memory of the Dalai Lama commenting one of his times in the USA about how it's much harder to be obese if you don't have the concept of dinner. (Although I can imagine as he said those words, probably all the fat monks he has ever known flashed before his eyes, haha.) And like I said, I think the usual starting meal is a sort of barley porridge and then for lunch a "dal bhat" - a spiced dish of rice, lentils, and at least one "vegetable" (which is in scare quotes because it could be for example potatoes). But I might just have had weird friends who liked weird things.
* Wholegrain oats (1.5 to 2 dl)
* Greek yogurt (1.5 to 2 dl)
* Milk, skimmed/whole (3 dl)
Then, throw in whatever. A sliced banana or berries, honey, a pinch of vanilla extract. Prep it in the evening, chuck it into the fridge, and it's done in the morning.
Citation needed. Virtually the entire planet has constant access to food, available 24/7/365, something that has never happened at any point in human history until very recently. Is there an actual statistically-significant trend of conscious meal skipping? In what population? Or are they just parroting something they heard on the internet? I can't access the article but I'd be very curious how they back this claim up.
Humans evolved under conditions of highly variable food stocks. I guarantee our distant ancestors ate when food was plentiful, fasted when it was not (no choice), and were certainly not eating 3 square meals on a regular schedule. Not saying that our hunter-gatherer diet was ideal, but if we evolved under those conditions, our default assumption should be that our bodies can handle it. Even the language ("skipping a meal") assumes that 3 meals is the natural baseline. Seems like the burden of proof runs the other way.
That, combined with the low sample size and the questionable research methodology, leads me to believe this is garbage science. Not worth reading.
The only people I know who have beaten obesity long term have done it with some combination of IF/keto/paleo. Everybody else backslides.
Note that the participants weren't overweight, if you are an average American this might not apply to you.
Also take into account your circadian rhythm. Humans have a variability of ~4h in our internal clocks, so when they eat lunch that might be breakfast for me.
If I eat dinner at 7pm and stay up until 2am (pretty normal for me), is that fine? Or did they toss me in with somebody who wakes up at 6am and goes to bed at 10pm, and thus only had maybe 2 hours between dinner and bed time?
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.Breakfast and Dinner
It is impossible for anyone to skip breakfast ;)
* 2-3 eggs
* an Impossible breakfast sausage (bacon is fine too but the ethics of it are hard for me)
* a bowl of Nature's Path pumpkin seed granola with whole milk
* a cup of OJ
* 1-3 cups of coffee for ADD-like symptoms, depending on how compressed I am with work
* multi vitamin, "stress" B-complex with ~100% RDA (instead of 5000%), omega-3
* zinc, low 1000s D3 for immunity a few times per week
* something with an adaptogen like RESTOR cycled as needed, I hear that mushroom coffee substitutes like MUD\WTR are good too
The main reason for this is that the body can't store protein for more than 4 hours before it starts going catabolic. So most athletic training generally improves with eating every 2.5-3 hours and never skipping meals.
The above menu is admittedly ableist. Conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar are primarily genetic. Unfortunately western medicine has to look at averages and make assumptions like "patients never exercise". So it's good practice to generally disregard well-meaning advice and adapt diets and workout programs to your own physiology.
I don't put any stock in intermittent fasting. It's always better to eat, even if the meal is a plain lettuce salad with little or no dressing other than an acid like vinegar diluted with water, maybe a dash of olive oil.
-- not that anyone cares, but since it's Saturday:
The best workout I have found so far is 2 working sets of 12 reps, starting with the bar and adding 40-50 pounds per warmup set, 1.5 hours every other day on a legs/chest/back/shoulders split each week. Always full range of motion, with light runner's stretch afterwards and corner or door stretches to open the chest. 5 minutes of cardio on the treadmill before workout and after stretching to warm up and flush lactic acid.
Why 12 reps? Because the "giving 110%" is built-in and it stays around a rated perceived exertion (RPE) of around 8-9 for maximum muscle growth without overtraining. I spent years plateaued at 3 sets of 8-12 reps, and 5x5 works great but with a higher risk of injury. 3 reps hacks the nervous system so sets get easier as they get heavier, but injury goes up, so I reserve those for deadlifts under ultimate concentration. A set of 20 reps at 50-60% working weight once per week 2 days before a body part overdrives work capacity and all but guarantees a 12 rep success on the later date. And 1 rep heavy singles as a warmup 40-50 pounds heavier than the working set primes the nervous system for a 12 rep success as well. So an example intermediate bench press program might look like: BARx12/95x12/135x12/185x6(reserve)/225x1/185x12x2, adding about 10 pounds to the working set every other week until another warmup set is added. Warmup rep count above 135 is usually a pyramid down from 75% or less to the heavy single to reserve endurance, for any exercise. All priming the body to expect another 50 pound set, so 1 RM PRs don't feel like they take everything you've got to achieve anymore. They might even happen next week! This might not sound like much, but the above blueprint could have saved me a decade of plateauing, so I'm writing it out for past me.
All you need is this:
https://strengthlevel.com/one-rep-max-calculator
I squat/bench/deadlift, overhead press, row and pull up more weight now at 45 than in my 20s, having never used performance-enhancing drugs. And more importantly, the high reps rebuilt my connective tissue so I'm injury-free after hurting my lower back over 2 dozen times. I feel that it's not possible to change one's weight healthily without exercise. In fact, I would say that the main struggle with weight control is around overcoming the workout avoidance and giving oneself 90 days to experience what it's like to change the body. That's where my love of working out started. Once it clicks, there's just no way to eat enough food anymore. And each day in the gym is a day younger, like aging backwards.
What I was going to say is that the body does protein synthesis for 24 hours after a workout, then healing quickly drops by a factor of 3. So it's important to shoot for around 200 grams of protein and not miss a meal the day after. But the day of the workout, it's ok to eat a little less, just make sure to eat 1-2 hours before exercise to have energy. That gives us an opportunity to either gain or lose weight without losing muscle, by scheduling our food intake in phase with protein synthesis.
That point about periodicity is what I was trying to get to, and why I believe that it's more important than variety. We can use 6-8 week training cycles to target muscle gain or weight loss. We can also tailor the program for work stress and seasons, maybe walking more to clear out cortisol during crunch time before a deadline, or eating more in the fall.
All of the above is the "why" behind which meal plans work. I don't think that eating advice makes any sense on its own outside the context of exercise.