Why having breakfast is so much emphasised?
In: Biology
Breakfast is relatively new.
Edit, this isn’t strictly true. Between about 500 and 1700 in Europe, breakfast wasn’t common – it was seen as a sign of low status and was heavily criticised by the religions of the time as being a sign of gluttony. People did eat a morning meal in, for example, ancient Rome or ancient Greece.
Until the 19th century most people (edit, in Europe) didn’t break their fast until lunch in many cases and two meals was the norm..
With the advent of specific breakfast cereals a market had to be created and one way to do that was to make breakfast ‘the most important meal of the day’.
In reality, back in ancient history, you’d have had to go and catch something or gather something to eat.
Humans have mechanisms to cope with not eating for long periods. One of these is the morning cortisol peak, which makes us feel good and energetic whether we’ve eaten or not. Obviously I don’t know exactly what this adaptation is for but it certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of getting out there and finding something to eat. It’s also part of the reason people who’ve drunk to much the night before sometimes feel ok initially and then their hangover his them later on.
We also have, as everyone knows, a tendency to store fat to use when food isn’t available and an ability to convert various other things to glucose. Unfortunately, we can convert glucose to fat but not fat to glucose. Bit of an oversight there… But we can go for surprisingly long periods with just plain water if necessary and far longer with very limited food intake as long as we get the micro nutrients we need and can’t create out of what we already have.
So, yeah, breakfast is important in that it’s a meal but, as long as your calorie and nutrient requirements are met, it doesn’t matter when you eat in particular.
There is plenty of evidence that intermittent fasting is not only not bad, but may be beneficial and there is masses of evidence that eating lots of carbohydrate first thing in the morning isn’t great news. You can, of course, cherry pick the evidence you want to listen to and you could easily find contrary evidence to disprove all of what I’ve said – I’m not trying to prove a point but this is my understanding.
Breakfast is vital because breakfast people need to sell you breakfast. The best way to do that is to tell you it will have awful consequences of you don’t eat it.
No one knows the actual optimal way to nourish a human body – there have been loads of experiments but it’s hard to control for all the competing factors and the genetics and whatnot. So we know for certain people in certain situations but not in general.
Some people like breakfast – good for them. Others don’t – good for them.
Just make sure you get what you need and you’ll be fine.
Best wishes.
Your body can adjust its metabolism to equal how much food it thinks you have access to. When your body thinks it has a lot of food you will feel like you have a lot of energy and be overall less hungry throughout the day. When your body thinks that you’re starving you will have almost no energy and feel hungry all day, regardless of how much you eat.
For some people, your body determines your metabolism based on how much food you eat over a several day long period. For those people eating breakfast doesn’t do anything, so if you’re one of them then whatever.
But there are some people whose bodies base their metabolism on how much food they eat within the first few hours of waking up. If those people don’t eat breakfast then their bodies get stuck in starvation mode for the rest of the day.
That means that they’re much more likely to be sedentary and overeat. From a health perspective that means that they’re much more likely to get fat.
It also means that mentally they’re a complete zombie until they have lunch, and even once they’ve had lunch they’re still a lot dumber than they otherwise would be. If you’ve ever had a shit coworker who acted like that there is a good chance that its just because they were one of those people that need to eat breakfast every day to be normal and they weren’t doing that.
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