Should we eat breakfast? Will breakfast make us less hungry as the day goes on? Will eating breakfast help us lose weight? Will breakfast jumpstart metabolism? Will eating breakfast make me thin or help me lose weight? The answer to all of those is no – they are myths brought on by the breakfast marketing team.
Inventor of breakfast cereal, surgeon, health writer, and vegetarian
We start our journey for breakfast health in Battle Creek, Michigan under the direction of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg was the most influential health guru of his day – a combination of Dr. Oz and Billy Graham. He was, like yours truly, a surgeon. In fact, Kellogg was one of the founding members of the American College of Surgeons. His surgical skill was admired but he is most known for his sanitarium (he invented the word) his many publications, both as a best selling author and editor of a the popular health magazine at the time. His views about health were clearly influenced by his Seventh Day Adventist religion – he was a vegetarian. His invention of Corn Flakes was to counter the popular breakfast meals of the day which were often based around meat.
Kellogg’s influence, and comments like, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” brought in the era of cereals for breakfast and a roll (also coffee, but he would object to coffee as evil- this is how we know he was a quack).
The second phase of marketing came in the 1930’s when Beach-Nut, who packaged bacon as well as chewing gum, wanted to increase their sales. So they hired the PR firm run by Edward Bernays. Using doctors, they took out advertisements in the major newspapers stating that a breakfast that is heavy, like bacon and eggs, is the best way to start the day. Listen to the podcast for the rest of that story.
How bad is bacon? Breakfast of Beach-Nut
Every article about breakfast for years was influenced by organizations from the Cereal Institute, to the Poultry and Bacon lobbies. All finding what they wanted to find to convince people to not only eat breakfast, but eat their version of breakfast.
That lobbying continues to this day.
Bottom line: breakfast isn’t important – if you eat it, great – if not, it won’t help you get skinny, it won’t boost your metabolism, and it won’t make you less hungry throughout the day.
Show Transcript:
What did you have for breakfast today? Has your idea of breakfast changed over time? Growing up, my mom fixed the daily breakfast of eggs, Bacon and grapefruit. Mom was influenced by the Iowa healthy breakfast study, which she was told you needed this healthy breakfast for school.
But if you grew up in the south you might’ve had biscuits and gravy. Meanwhile, California didn’t invent granola. It is often associated with the California breakfast. And Coffee. We have coffee.
And no doubt you heard the saying eat breakfast like a king lunch, like a prince and dinner like a pauper. Adele Davis, the health gurus, who died of cancer, said that of course she said a lot of nutty things.
Lots of claims about breakfast lose weight, jumpstart your metabolism and be less hungry. We will see the breakfast is more influenced by marketing than science, but there is science.
Today, breakfast myths, realities, marketing’s hopes and what we know from science.
My name is Dr. Terry Simpson and this is Culinary Medicine; where we sort out the crazy from credible about food from its source to its effect on your body. Busting myths and showing evidence where food can be medicine,
Breakfast or breaking of the fast is the first meal. One eats after a night time of fasting, assuming you slept. But throughout time, what one eats for breakfast has changed. Romans eight mostly bread and leftovers. They also had pancakes. No Maple Syrup. We would have to wait for the Canadians for that one.
Early Americans ate cold meats, rice, and hominy and usually leftovers from the night before. One restaurant menu from 1901 had chicken on the menu for breakfast.
But the idea of a healthy breakfast came in shortly after that. If you were wealthy or famous and had problems, you would go to one of the health spas of the day. The most famous of the day was in Battle Creek, Michigan from the 1870s till its decline in the Great Depression. It was their version of Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop, pedaling nonsensical cures to the rich and famous and using that as leverage to peddle cures to America.
John D Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, President’s Harding, and Taft along with Mary Todd Lincoln and Amelia Earhart were all guests at this health spa run by a Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented, by the way the word sanitarium for his health spa.
He had strong views about health, influenced by his religion. Kellogg was a seventh day Adventists who believe that the evils of society where meat, tobacco, alcohol, and sex. He never consummated his own marriage.
Meat in his religion was evil leading to lustful thoughts. To avoid this, he invented an alternative breakfast that contained no meat. He said that this would not only solve the problems of indigestion or dyspepsia as many of his clients complained of, but this would be a morning anti masturbatory meal. And for the record, no one has ever studied that conclusion.
His invention, which you know as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, was made available widely to the public in about 1906
. Kellogg also had his own health magazine. It was called Good Health. One of the most well read magazines about health during the day. It was that day’s version of Prevention Magazine peddling his own version of health, wellness, and nonsensical cures in his magazine. He was the first to state that “breakfast was the most important meal of today. “
Today’s corn flakes have a slightly different recipe than the original ones that Dr Kellogg invented. His brother decided to add sugar to them because they were going to sell these to the masses and breakfast. Cereal made Kellogg richer than a sanitarium.
His health advice took hold and America went from a breakfast of meats and rice to one of cereals and rolls.
Then came the second wave of marketing and the 1930s. Beach-Nutt, of chewing gum fame, but they were also bacon producers wanted to increase bacon sales, so they turned to the PR firm of one Edward Bernays. Since breakfast had become lighter due to Kellogg’s influence, one of cereals and coffee and a roll, they wanted to change that.
Bernays asked the company physician if a heavier breakfast would be good. The doctor agreed and they mailed 5,000 physicians and ask them if they agreed. 4,500 of them did and the firm took out advertisements in the nation’s newspapers. It said you need a heavy breakfast to start the day. And what goes best with breakfast, Bacon and eggs. You need a heavy breakfast, the doctor stated, to give you energy and boost your metabolism and help you work harder and longer. The marketing worked.
Beach-Nut’s bacon sales increased. Then the all-American breakfast of Bacon and eggs was born.
Bernays is considered the father of American marketing.The original madman of Madison Avenue, Bernays’ uncle was influential in his thoughts about marketing. His uncle — Sigmund Freud.
Two competing ideas about breakfast, one based on meat for a good start, one based on cereal for another kind of start, or lack of start. Both with plenty of health claims and then those ideas became firmly entrenched in the minds of people.
Two competing thoughts about what’s good for breakfast, so they began to test those hypotheses.
Who sponsored those studies? Turned out industry did: the cereal industry, the poultry industry, the bacon industry. Does that bother you? To be fair, just because an industry sponsors the study does not mean the study is flawed, but it should raise a level of skepticism. One must be skeptical of a study that draws the conclusions according to the industry that’s funds it.
The Iowa breakfast study for example, if you want to get a copy of the original plenty papers you have to write to the Cereal Institute and if you read them, there was actually not that much difference between the workability of a skipped breakfast or not. That’s probably not what you heard the study said.
What about weight loss? You’ve probably heard all of those studies that associate people who eat breakfast as having less excess weight than those who skip breakfast. The problem is they are two different groups of people, meaning those who regularly breakfast and those who regularly skip breakfast. They’re just looking at one factor between people who are skinny and those who are not adding calories. If you normally skip breakfast doesn’t appear to be a good weight loss strategy. Instead of looking at breakfast eaters versus non-breakfast eaters.
What happens if you take some group of people, the same group of people and randomize them to a group of breakfast eaters and then change them to a group of people who skip breakfast? There have been 13 such studies and what did they conclude? There is no evidence that eating breakfast helps you lose weight. And in fact, in some studies, people who started to eat breakfast gained weight, what a thought. Eat more calories during the day by taking up breakfast and you don’t lose weight.
Those studies also didn’t look at what is eaten for breakfast. Did you know that yogurt has more sugar than most ice creams, even the so-called Greek yogurts? Maybe you thought Granola was a health food. That’s how it’s marketed. But granola is properly classified as dessert. If you were to eat a bowl of Quaker oats and honey and natural Granola, you’re eating 26 grams of sugar and 420 calories. So to put it another way, you’re eating the same amount of sugar as in five Oreo cookies. And as much as my son loves Oreos, I wouldn’t allow him to have that for breakfast.
And if you check in with the American Heart Association, the total amount of sugar that a woman should have is 24 grams a day or 32 grams for a man. Starting out the day with all of your sugar. It isn’t healthy unless you’re trying to gain weight and have a sugar deficiency.
That bran muffin you ordered from the counter of the local coffee shop has more calories and fat than a Big Mac. And then there are the other cereals that are a little more than pastry in a bowl of milk.
What about jumpstarting your metabolism? You wake up and rev up your metabolism. Does breakfast work to do that? Well, the data is not agreeing with that. Some data about fasting shows no difference in metabolism. Some data show that people who eat breakfast expend more energy: riding a bike, going to a gym, running, but that’s those two groups of people. The group of people who ate breakfast tend to be the group of people who ride bikes and are active. So that may or may not be you.
The latest study in people, whether they skipped breakfast or not, had no effect on people who were lean. But what about people who are not lean? What about people who are a little portly, zaftig? Or let’s say people who have Metabolic Syndrome with insulin resistance, it turns out eating or skipping breakfast had no difference.
Do you eat less if you have breakfast? It turns out that it’s kind of up to you. If you are a breakfast eater, maybe. If you’re not, then you end up eating more calories by having the breakfast. The science is all over on this one.
Breakfast doesn’t boost your metabolism. if you are not hungry, there isn’t evidence to say you must or should eat it. The evidence that you lose weight with breakfast is not convincing.
And if you have weight to lose, those extra calories at breakfast won’t help you lose more. Nor is the evidence that you’ll be less hungry if you eat breakfast. There are plenty of people who eat breakfast and do just fine, so if you like it, great. If not, don’t stress.
On a scale of one to five where one is a food con and five is science breakfast is a 2.5. Coffee, of course, it has to be a solid five.
Thank you for listening to this episode of culinary medicine with me, Dr. Terry Simpson, and while I am a doctor just like Dr. Harvey Kellogg, but hopefully better trained, I am not your doctor. And you should always seek the advice of a trusted licensed medical provider with experience in your particular condition or concerned before taking any actions. Although if they prescribed a coffee enema run Coffee’s by mouth. Culinary medicine is a part of YourDoctorsOrders network and you can find the post and some references on YourDoctorsOrders.com We are produced and distributed by our friends at Simpler Media. And my executive producer is the talented and lovely @Producergirl from Producergirl productions. You can follow me on Twitter where I am @drterrysimpson. And I’ll be back next time when we’ll have another conversation about food as medicine or unveil another food costs. Until then, don’t drink the water. Drink the wine. Hey, Evo, When you were on the sausage and beer diet, what was the first thing you had for breakfast on the November 1st when you were off the beer and sausage diet? Evo: Oh, that’s easy. Sausage and eggs because you can take the boy out Oklahoma, but. l.
References:
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Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Feb;93(2):284-91. Epub 2010 Nov 17. Pub Med ID # 21084650
This study showed “there was no significant main effect of breakfast condition on energy intake at lunch (P = 0.36) or throughout the remainder of the day (P = 0.85). There was a significant main effect of breakfast condition (P = 0.04) on total daily energy intake, which indicated that on the day when the subjects did not eat breakfast, they consumed 362 fewer calories over the course of the day than when they did eat breakfast. On the day when no breakfast was served, subjects indicated that they were significantly hungrier, less full, and could consume more food before lunch than on the day when they did eat breakfast (P < 0.001). Leading to the conclusion that omitting breakfast affected children’s appetite ratings but not their energy intake at subsequent meals. The dissonance between children’s subjective ratings of prospective consumption and their actual intake should be further examined.” Proving – less intake means less calories consumed in the day.
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