Is Breakfast Really The Most Important Meal Of The Day?

A popular advice by nutrition author Adelle Davis has been common for almost half a century concerning nutrition habits and which says: “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

However, recent examination has raised the question on whether one should really have a king’s breakfast, or skip it all together, stressing that the “most important meal of the day” should not be attributed to any of the meals.

In the study, researchers addressed some of the most commonly asked questions about breakfast:

Does skipping breakfast make you eat more?

A laboratory study has shown that skipping breakfast results in lower total energy intake over the course of a day than eating breakfast. So, despite greater hunger during the morning and some compensation during lunch, the effect of skipping breakfast doesn’t seem great enough to make people overshoot the calorie deficit created by missing the morning meal.

Does breakfast ‘kick start’ your metabolism?

Eating sets a variety of biological processes associated with digesting and storing food into action, which result in increased energy expenditure known as diet induced thermogenesis (DIT). So, yes, breakfast does kick start your metabolism.

A recent study has even shown that this increase in expenditure is more pronounced in the morning than the evening. But there is a major problem with pinning your hopes on this “jump start” to offset the energy in your breakfast, since DIT accounts for a proportion of the food you eat, ranging between 10 and 15% of energy intake.  

But there might be more to this than just the increased metabolism due to digestion. New evidence published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that those assigned to eat breakfast used more energy through physical activity than those fasting. So it might be that skipping breakfast makes people feel less energetic so they reduce their levels of physical activity, without consciously realizing it.

Does skipping breakfast make you gain weight?

Skipping breakfast is associated with greater weight and increased fatness over time. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that skipping breakfast causes the weight gain. It could be that eating breakfast is simply a marker of a healthy lifestyle and, in itself, doesn’t protect against obesity.

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