Why is it important to have breakfast in the morning?
In: Biology
TLDR: It isn’t.
Joke answer: Because that’s the only time you can have breakfast. If you eat it later, it’s lunch.
Full answer: If you’re referring to the expression “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” that’s a very successful advertising line of American cereal makers. There are a few myths about the benefits of breakfast, but there is some tentative science behind it, too. I’ll address both.
One argument that is made for breakfast is that “it gives you energy for the day.” There’s a little to this: if you ate quick-digesting sugars that morning, that energy woudl be available to you that day. Most other things take longer to digest and wouldn’t be useful immediately. That said if you skip breakfast, it’s not like you don’t have energy. We have glycogen stores in our muscles and liver, and of course fat reserves we can tap. Many people report being more alert and energized while fasted, so the breakfast foods aren’t necessary for you to have energy, and in fact the slow-digesting foods may sap some of your energy during the day (as your body uses energy to digest instead of act). The effects here are rather small, so for most people it makes sense to do what feels right to them.
A related story is that if you eat breakfast, you’ll burn those calories during the day, but eating late will convert them to fat overnight. That’s generally wrong: for the most part, your net calories determine weight gain or weight loss, with some variance based on what you eat.
One other myth that exists is that eating in the morning “jump starts” your metabolism and you burn more calories during the day. This is false. Eating does raise your metabolism temporarily, as, like I said above, you need energy to digest food. This happens whenever you eat, so it’s not special about breakfast, and it doesn’t burn more calories based on when you eat.
However, science does seem to show that eating lots in the morning is the right time for many people. This is very tentative research, but for example intermittent fasters report that it’s easier to do with a morning meal rather than an evening meal, perhaps with better results. (Selection is a big issue in these trials, so we don’t really know.) It does seem like eating less in the evening lets people sleep better and also tends to avoid things like heartburn, but that’s a small effect as well.
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