Habitually Skipping Breakfast Is Associated with the Risk of GI Cancers
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
I used to intentionally skip breakfast as a part of an intermittent fasting routing. I wasn't particularly strict about it, and I didn't really buy into the ketogenesis arguments. But it was a calorie restriction scheme that worked for my lifestyle.
Fast forward a few years, and while I still miss breakfast a lot, I find now it's because of work stress. It seems like I can't ever get out of bed in the morning without being immediately greeted by some "emergency" that popped up overnight, and jumping into that before I've really had any opportunity to start the day on my own terms.
I can't help but feel like the latter is going to be a lot more correlated with health problems down the road than the former.
The mention of liver cancer makes me wonder if it's a hydration issue. Fasting intentionally shouldn't be correlated with dehydration, but missing breakfast due to crisis may mean you are skipping hydration and not making up for it.
Dehydration isn't good for you generally.
And when my dad was told to get his affairs in order, his cancer was going to kill him, hydration was a big focus for my parents. He lived another two decades.
So obviously I'm an idiot and it's "anecdata" and I can't cite any large scale studies, but I can wonder in good faith if hydration might impact cancer for more people than just my father.
And the Houston Clinic interviewed my mother on tape for two hours because they knew they didn't keep him alive, she did, and changed their practices because of what she said. So people with better medical credentials than "My daddy didn't die when he was supposed to" also thought maybe something my parents did was significant.
+100 on cancer support via nutrition and hydration though. Folks don't realize how many cancer outcomes are exacerbated by "I just won't get my nutrients checked and continue with my normal diet." Your body is fundamentally different, especially on chemo, and needs different support.
Maybe someone more invested in this question will go down a rabbit hole and share. I was just doing a gut check of my knee jerk reaction of "But what I know of the human body...."
Something like hepatorenal syndrome [0] would be a liver to kidney collapse, but that's more to do with blood supply.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23399-hepator...
Gets me:
Yes (in big bold lettering) followed by a statement that it increases sodium and thickens the blood, interfering with circulation, which my cheap phone is refusing to let me copy-paste.
Yes there are exceptions to this rule but in general 'no' being my default until I'm up and running has basically only brought benefits. Hope things improve!
People with overall unhealthy lifestyle are more likely to be breakfast skippers, but even controlling for these variables, the effect remains.
Not that I keep up with the (largely junk) nutritional studies, but this blurb surprised me:
>...In recent years, breakfast skipping has been proven to be associated with obesity,9 impaired glucose metabolism,10 cardiovascular disease,11 impaired cognitive function,12 and even cancer.13 Recently, a prospective study conducted in China found that habitually skipping breakfast is associated with chronic inflammation, as assessed by the C-reactive protein (CRP) concentration.14
Was this funded by the Chinese-Kellogg equivalent?
Since there’s definitely a cohort that skips breakfast for health reasons, and has a healthy weight as a result, I’d wonder if the data is multimodal and there’s some other group that skips breakfast and is unhealthy that’s overshadowing the heathy modal.
Skipping breakfast is not necessarily a fasting technique, but a consequence of over eating.
Not everything has to be a moral failing.
I also don't intentionally fast, I just eat when I feel like it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19638728/#:~:text=Skipping%2...).
Why not start the day with breakfast and not eat late in the evenings? Eating late is also often linked to poor sleep
I do not consider my lifestyle fasting, though I rarely eat breakfast and typically have dinner 6-7pm. Which is ~6 hours before I go to bed.
N=1 here, but I have IBD and immediate family history of rectal cancer, and I definitely feel the worst in the mornings. That kind of pain is strongly correlated with not wanting to put food in my mouth.
It might be that people who have GI problems are more likely to skip breakfast. Or there might be something else that causes both.
Be careful when reading studies...
In many cases, I found really absurd causal claims, plus a total ignorance of confounding and causal inference techniques.
It is shocking that many researchers in biology and medicine have never heard about many of the topics surveyed in e.g. Chapter 36 of Kevin Murphy's second book [1].
The reason is that the set of human behavior is so fast and unfathomably complicated. Any two aspects of life are surely correlated by many factors that are influenced by lifestyle.
Besides, large biobanks provide a wealth of observational data which can be explored using causal inference. One can always use a RCT on promising hypotheses.
It is extremely important to not overreact to reports of correlation without causation.
A report that something is linked to cancer can be worrying, but is not yet enough to make inferences.
Here is a list of things that are linked (correlated) to each other:
* years of experience programming and a chance of getting cancer
* number of births and chance of getting osteoporosis
* having a surgery and dying of surgery-related complications (can't have complications if you don't have surgery)
* GDP and a chance of getting diagnosed with cancer at a young age (generally, the higher GDP the higher the chance your cancer gets caught earlier or at all -- in many poor countries nobody cares what you died to)
Etc.
Turns out laying down for hours and having stomach acid wash up into your esophagus and irritating it makes it somewhat unpleasant to eat. It takes me a while after getting up for everything to settle before I can eat.
This also substantially raises my risk of GI cancers.
We know there’s a causal link between things like GERD and GI cancers. This could just be showing a relationship between GERD and skipping breakfast which has a much clearer method of action than “not eating food first thing in the morning gives you cancer”.
If they have tried to control for confounding variables (people who skip breakfast are generally more unhealthy/more likely to be drug users/more likely to smoke, etc), what are the methods they use? Are they reliable?
I find myself thinking about making serious lifestyle changes in response to these articles, but many of them contradict each other.
Which is honestly about the best you can get from human behavior. Unlike rats, you cannot lock up humans for their lifetime, force-feeding them a diet of gruel for trial A meanwhile trial B gets a diet of corn-syrup and beer.
Better studies will try to subtract out meaningful differences (eg smokers vs non-smokers), but there is only so much that can be done when humans lie, cheat, steal, and misremember their behavior on questionnaires they fill out years after the fact.
Even if they do make an attempt to control for such things, it's often useless. There's only so much you can do with limited data and if you're not of exceedingly high character, there's a lot of ways to cheat intentionally or accidentally.
So, this kind of result means very little. It _may_ be a thing that a better study could be based on, that's about it.
I personally would not be making changes in my life based on this type of result.
Also, apparently in 2014 there was an article describing Xi Jinping's lifestyle, which reported he ate breakfast daily before dawn. This study started in 2014. Probably a total coincidence, but ...
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-glimpse-president-x...
Or is there more to this?
Meshes with all of the other studies that show no benefit to TRF or IF unrelated to weight-loss (which can be achieved without TRF/IF), and the studies showing harm, like this one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9182756/
and this one:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368542960_Insulin_r...
Apparently none of you have heard of Dr. Panda, which means you've done barely any research into any of this, and yet you're still smugly confident that TRF/IF are safe and healthy? Enough to nit-pick the studies saying otherwise, and downvote and flag those posting them?
sounds like bullshit.
Given the esophageal cancer, I'm going to guess that most participants considered a hot drink to be skipping breakfast as a drink isn't food whether or not it has calories.
I have never heard this.
In America, if someone says they are eating breakfast, I assume they are eating junk: bagels, McMuffins, cereal bars, etc. Not muesli.