Is breakfast REALLY the most important meal of the day?

There are a lot of studies which associate "eating a healthy breakfast" with "weighing less and generally being more healthy overall." In fact, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" is a bit of entrenched received wisdom, one of those pseudo-facts that we pass amongst ourselves without question.

Well, Slate correspondent Daniel Engber questioned it. And what he found was that, while there is plenty of evidence to suggest that skipping any meal is bad, breakfast being the MOST important meal of the day is bad science. A study recently published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition asserts that not only is the breakfast link weak at best, but a lot of research bias is on evidence in these studies of breakfast-eaters.

The problem is that it's almost impossible to isolate "eats breakfast" from the context of everything else about a person's life. However, breakfast-eaters are overwhelmingly more likely to be rich, white, and engage in regular physical exercise, which strongly suggests that breakfast alone isn't what's keeping them trim and healthy.

Breakfast-skippers, on the other hand, tend to be poor, work long hours, and function on a sleep deficit. You wake up exhausted and late and you have to get to work, there's no time for bacon and eggs. But is skipping breakfast the problem, or is it other factors of poverty, such as stress levels, little access to medical care, and chronic lack of sleep?

We can say for sure that breakfast strongly correlates to weight. People who eat breakfast weigh less, and tend to lose weight over time. But trying to draw any direct conclusion from those facts is laughable, particularly since many of these breakfast studies make no attempt to control for income level, gender, or ethnic background.

Can it hurt to start eating breakfast, if you aren't already? I suppose not. But as Engber points out, "it contributes to a din of pointless health advice." Eat if you're hungry, and make the best choice you can. Tuck a healthy granola bar into your pocket on your way out the door, and if you feel like eating it, then do. If you don't, then save it for later. Don't stress about your breakfast decision, just listen to your body!

Image courtesy Flickr/Kurt Wagner