Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing

In their patterns of eating the Greeks and Romans were apparently not unusual, and Heather Anderson opened her 2013 book Breakfast: A History with: ‘Throughout history, most people partook of a simple breakfast … ample written record supports the notion that ancient Romans had a three-meals-a-day (plus afternoon snack) routine similar to that of today’s United States and Europe.’3

But that routine was not imperishable, and it appears that for a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire breakfast was skipped in polite Europe. Thus Charlemagne (748–814) was described as being typical in not eating breakfast,4 while 700 years later a King of France, Francis I (1494–1547), was still saying that people should ‘rise at five, dine at nine, sup at five, and couch at nine’,5 and a generation after that the priest William Harrison was reporting in his 1577 Description of England that ‘the nobility, gentry and students do ordinarily go to dinner at 11 and to supper at 5,’6 which was reiterated as late as 1602 by Dr Edmund Hollings, the Renaissance dietician.7 So, what happened to breakfast after the fall of the Roman Empire?

The Church was one of the things that happened. The clerics disapproved of breakfast as self-indulgent, and, inspired by biblical passages such as Ecclesiastes 10:16, ‘Woe to thee, O land, when … thy princes eat in the morning,’ a writer such as Thomas Aquinas could write in his Summa Theologica (1265–74) that breakfast represented praepropere or the sin of eating too soon, which was a form of gluttony. Breakfast in medieval Europe was largely, therefore, restricted to children, the elderly, the sick – and to working men: it appears that labourers, needing to fuel their labours, would eat in the morning.

Which was the other thing that happened to breakfast after the fall of the Roman Empire, namely the hierarchy of the feudal system. If working men needed to eat breakfast, then grandees were keen not only to skip it but also to be seen to skip it. Medieval aristocrats, therefore, apparently ate breakfast only when they had to exert themselves, perhaps if travelling or going on pilgrimage, whereupon their spiritual advisers discovered that John 21:12 (‘Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast,”’ English Standard Version) did actually license the practice. So in 1255 Henry III of England ordered 6 tuns of wine (2,112 gallons) for his court’s breakfasts while on pilgrimage.8

Only with the displacement of feudalism by markets was breakfast revived as a regular meal for the socially respectable, and in his popular article ‘How the Tudors Invented Breakfast’ Dr Ian Mortimer argued that as the market economy spread, and as people thus worked longer and harder, so those people increasingly demanded three meals a day including breakfast.9 By 1589, therefore, Thomas Cogan, the Manchester physician and schoolmaster, could write in his Haven of Health that it was unhealthy to skip breakfast because to ‘suffer hunger long filleth the stomack with ill humors’.10

Breakfast in England: Margaret Lane, the author of Jane Austen and Food, has chronicled how, for the rich, breakfast then evolved: ‘Breakfast in Jane Austen’s era [she lived between 1775 and 1817] was very different from the cold meat, coarse bread and ale of earlier ages, or the abundance of eggs, kidneys, bacon and so forth under which Victorian sideboards groaned. Rather it was an elegant light meal of toast and rolls, with tea, coffee or chocolate to drink.’11

But Austen’s era was still socially divided, and to reinforce their superiority the grander classes ate their breakfasts late: ‘The planned excursion from Barton Park to Whitwell in Sense and Sensibility begins with the whole party assembling at Barton Park for breakfast at ten … Jane frequently wrote letters before breakfast. In London she even went shopping.’12 Dissolute members of the aristocracy might breakfast even later. Roger Carbury in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now, ‘would come at twelve as Felix generally breakfasted at that hour’.13

The late breakfasts, though, pressed up against dinner, which was then eaten in the middle of the day and which was then – as it had been for a thousand years – the biggest meal of the day, so that meal gradually got pushed back. Eventually, as the prosperous classes increasingly enjoyed an evening social life facilitated by candle and other artificial lights, their dinner moved so late as to become an evening meal, largely displacing supper, which was reduced to a bedtime snack. But the lateness of dinner then created a midday gap, which had to be filled by a new meal, which was sometimes called ‘nuncheon’ after ‘noonshine’ (in Sense and Sensibility Willoughby takes nuncheon in an inn) but which became corrupted to ‘luncheon’ (in Pride and Prejudice Lydia and Kitty order luncheon in an inn).

Recapitulating its origins in a snack, this new meal was initially only a cold spread, but as Anthony Trollope captured in The Way We Live Now, it grew: ‘There were two dinner parties every day, one at two o’clock called lunch, and the other at eight.’14 The confusions around the new meal were reflected in 1847 by a fashionable physician, Dr William Robertson, in his Treatise on Diet and Regimen: ‘that anomalous meal, luncheon, becomes necessary or desirable if the dinner cannot be taken about five hours after the breakfast. If a man … cannot dine before five in the evening, he should eat luncheon.’15

The working classes, though, continued to eat their dinner in the middle of the day, and some parts of the north of England and Scotland still describe the midday meal as dinner and the evening meal as tea or high tea. To this day many schools describe the ladies who serve lunch as ‘dinner ladies’.

Breakfast in America: Heather Anderson reports that, initially, the Americans and Britons shared a common breakfast culture:

By the middle of the 18th century, England and America alike were basking in the glow of breakfast’s budding golden age; matitudinal feasts of mutton chops, bacon, eggs, corn cakes, and muffins – even pies – were favourites of American Founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson … Franklin’s only complaint was that his co-workers drank too much beer in the morning … In well-to-do English households, most days began with porridge, followed by bacon and eggs … Soon the Victorian era witnessed the birth of Britain’s greatest (perhaps only) culinary achievement: the Full Breakfast.fn1

But as American meals and waistlines expanded, so a reaction developed, and during the 1830s the Popular Health Movement arose to advocate a frugal, near-vegetarian diet. In 1863, to help meet the demand for a more modest lifestyle, Dr James Caleb Jackson (1811–95), a New York physician, invented Granula, which consisted of nuggets of bran-rich Graham flour (a type of wholemeal flour). The first wholegrain breakfast cereal had arrived.

In the same year, 1863, and emerging in part from the same Popular Health Movement, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was established at Battle Creek, Michigan. The Adventists’ theology lies outside the purlieus of this book but its health message is relevant because it promotes a vegetarian, alcohol- and caffeine-free lifestyle. In 1866 the Church opened a sanatorium, also at Battle Creek, where its vegetarian teachings were harnessed to cure as well as to prevent disease. Its therapies were holistic, employing nutrition, enemas and exercise; and it was at the sanatorium, in 1894, that its most famous superintendent, Dr John Kellogg (1854–1943), invented cornflakes. Dr Jackson’s Granula had not been very convenient (it needed to be soaked overnight) but cornflakes were very convenient indeed, and with his brother, Will, John Kellogg created the cereal company we know today.

Some of the beliefs of those Popular Health Movement pioneers are now easy to mock. In his 1877 Plain Facts for Old and Young John Kellogg advocated some robust measures against masturbation:

To prevent erection the prepuce or foreskin is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to another. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur … In females the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.16

And in his 1893 Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease John Kellogg indeed recommended clitorectomy for nymphomania. An early example of FGM in the western world. Yet John’s views on masturbation were not an isolated idiosyncrasy, because they seemingly linked to his views on breakfast: he apparently trusted that the low levels of cornflake nutrition would inhibit early morning masturbation. Meat, he believed, fuelled lust: ‘Flesh, condiments, eggs, tea, chocolate and all stimulants have a powerful influence directly on the reproductive organs. They increase the local supply of blood; and through nervous sympathy with the brain, the passions are aroused.’17 But cornflakes would leave a person energetically deprived.18

Although he never explicitly marketed cornflakes as an energy-depleting anti-masturbatory tool, John Kellogg nonetheless conceived breakfast cereals – which are now sold as nutritionally valuable – to be nutritionally poor. The history of breakfast is littered with these ironies because, until recently, opinions emerged out of beliefs, not out of empirical evidence.

John was an intellectual who took ideas seriously. His views on masturbation were then orthodox, as were his views on eugenics (he was in favour) and constipation (he was against), but his brother, Will, was not an intellectual and – to promote their palatability – he put sugar into cornflakes, which John opposed. John lost that fight but it was sincerely fought.

One of their contemporaries, Dr Dewey of Meadville, Pennsylvania, went even further, and in his 1900 book The No-Breakfast Plan and the Fasting Cure he advocated skipping breakfast altogether: Dewey wrote that patients who skipped breakfast seemed to make better and faster cures from illnesses than did breakfast eaters.

The revival of breakfast: By the 1920s Dr Dewey seemed to be winning the argument: breakfast in America was apparently declining into little more than a snack. This was a concern to the Beech-Nut Packing Company, which was raising lots of pigs but which was finding too few buyers for its bacon, and it therefore commissioned Edward Bernays to rescue its market.

Bernays, one of the fathers of PR, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose techniques he exploited on behalf of powerful clients, which included American Tobacco (for whom he helped break the taboo against women smoking in public) and the United Fruit Company (for whom he helped engineer the coup that removed the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman). Bernays, famously, influenced Goebbels, which is no surprise since in his 1928 book Propaganda he’d written:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.19

One opinion of the masses that Bernays resolved to manipulate was their commitment to a ‘very light breakfast of coffee, with maybe a roll and orange juice’, which he sought to replace ‘with a heavy breakfast’; and in a film (still available as a video on the web)20 Bernays explained how he mobilised 4,500 doctors to publicly support Beech-Nut’s faith in heavy breakfasts.fn2 In the words of Dr Kaori O’Connor, a social anthropologist at University College London and the author of the 2013 book The English Breakfast: The Biography of an English Meal: ‘the idea that [breakfast] is healthy in its own right was laid on a plate for us by marketing companies. And, by and large, we’ve gobbled it up.’21

The breakfast mantras: It was in 1847, in the fourth edition of his Treatise on Diet and Regimen, that Dr William Robertson, who practised medicine in Buxton, Derbyshire, UK, wrote that ‘Breakfast should always be an important, if not the most important, meal of the day.’22 As I have already noted, Dr Robertson was a prominent physician, so it behoves us to ask: what research led him to coin that momentous phrase? Which careful observations, which controlled experiments, underpinned that weighty idiom? Well, this is what he wrote: ‘Breakfast is very properly made to consist of a considerable proportion of liquids, to supply the loss of the fluids of the body during the hours of sleep.’

Eh? It is true we lose water through our lungs and sweat glands as we sleep, but why was Dr Robertson so fixated on that? Well, Dr Robertson was a water physician: he practised in Buxton, which was a spa town whose waters were believed to cure myriad diseases, so of course Dr Robertson believed that water lay at the heart of health and illness. But that belief – which is barely more advanced than Hippocrates’ belief in the four humours – is an absurdity. Yet Dr Robertson was no one-trick pony, and he also believed that ‘the nervous system is restored by sleep to its fullest power and activity,’ and that we should therefore eat early ‘before the nervous system has become expended by its mental and physical labours’, which is a further absurdity.

The other great breakfast mantra is, of course, Adelle Davis’s injunction to ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.’23 Adelle Davis (1904–74) was the most popular nutritionist in America of her day, and though she was a controversial figure who was regularly accused of misusing science to promote dietary fads, she sold over 10 million copies of books with titles such as Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954). As to her famous mantra, let us ask: what was the thinking behind it? Did it emerge from the systematic scientific study of a problem that is still urgent today, or did it emerge out of a health scare that has since been discredited?

Post-war, America went through a strange panic over low blood sugar levels, and a charity called the Hypoglycemia Foundation claimed that ‘There is probably no illness today which causes so much widespread suffering, so much inefficiency and loss of time, so many accidents, so many family breakups and so many suicides as hypoglycemia.’24

The media followed suit, and a magazine such as Family Circle could in June 1965 assert that ‘millions among us … suffer unknowingly from low blood sugar’ while Town and Country could state in June 1971 that ‘ten million Americans have hypoglycaemia.’ Respected professionals fed the national anxiety, and a psychiatrist wrote that

‘about half of the people I see for psychiatric problems have abnormal blood sugar … the incidence in schizophrenia is high and in neuroses even higher.’25

Adelle Davis herself asserted that ‘irritability resulting from low blood sugar can be a factor in divorces.’26

It is rare for a bizarre new idea to emerge without someone, somewhere, profiting from it, and it appears that the hypoglycaemia scare coincided with the discovery that adrenal extracts – which were expensive and therefore profitable to administer – could ‘cure’ hypoglycaemia; but the respectable authorities rallied against the charlatans, and in 1973 the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Endocrine Society published a joint statement saying that few Americans suffer from low blood sugar levels, which in any case were not dangerous:

Statement on Hypoglycemia

Recent publicity in the popular press has led the public to believe that the occurrence of hypoglycemia is high in this country and that many of the symptoms that affect the American population are not recognised as being caused by this condition. These claims are not supported by the medical evidence.27

Adelle Davis, therefore, coined her great aphorism to address a non-problem: she knew that the blood sugar levels of breakfast skippers fell gently during the mornings,28 and since raised blood sugar levels are one of the great killers of our time, so the same data that inspired Davis’s mantra should now inspire its revision: Eat breakfast like a pauper.

We see, therefore, that the two popular breakfast mantras were coined to address the non-problems of night-time dehydration, night-time starvation, brain fatigue and rampant hypoglycaemia, yet those mantras remain so potent that many people today believe they have a metabolic duty to eat breakfast. In a world where millions of people overeat, their pushing themselves to eat a meal they might otherwise skip is not a trivial matter.

The Mediterranean breakfast: Judging by the longevities of the people who eat it, the Mediterranean diet is healthier than that of northern Europe or North America, and in his 2003 book Food in Early Modern Europe Ken Alabala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific, California, notes that in southern Europe breakfast never really developed: ‘In countries where the evening meal was larger, breakfast did not become important. In southern Europe it is still not a proper meal, but merely coffee and perhaps a piece of bread or pastry. In England and the north [of Europe] the pattern was quite different.’29

As a group of senior Italian nutritionists wrote in 2009: ‘Every morning, most [Italian] adults just drink a cup of coffee or a cappuccino.’30

Yet as the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the CIA have all confirmed, the Italians live longer than either the British or the Americans.31 That doesn’t, of course, prove that breakfast is bad for you, but it does weaken the suggestion that good health is impossible without it.

Overview: When, in Tudor times, the European aristocracy ceased to skip breakfast, certain wise contemporaries expressed alarm. In 1542 the celebrated physician Andrew Boorde wrote in his Dietary of Health that ‘A labourer may eat three times a day but two meals a day are adequate for a rest man.’32

Why? Because, Boorde said, ‘repletion shortens a man’s life.’33 Equally, in his Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health of 1602,34 the scholar William Vaughan advised us to:

‘eat three meals a day until you come to the age of 40 years,’35

which was echoed by Sir John Harington (1560–1612):

‘feed only twice a day when you are at man’s age.’36

As we’ll discover, breakfast is dangerous because it is eaten when the body is most insulin-resistant, and, as we’ll also discover, the people who are most at risk of insulin-resistance are those who are over 45 years old and physically inactive. We might do worse than recapitulate the sixteenth-century wisdom of Dr Boorde and others.

Our best guide to breakfast may be Franz Kafka, who in his 1915 book Metamorphosis described how ‘for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day.’37 This description is often invoked by pro-breakfast scientists,38 but their confidence is misplaced because the full quote is: ‘The washing up from breakfast lay on the table; there was so much of it because, for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and he would stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers.’ Kafka is actually telling us that Gregor’s father is a jerk, who won’t work to support his family but who will nonetheless lash out at Gregor, the family breadwinner.

And with that image of breakfast as the meal of moral degenerates, I shall end this review of its history.

3

Breakfast in an age of commercial science

An article published in 1917 in Good Health, the self-proclaimed ‘oldest health magazine in the world’, reiterated that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’1 and Good Health was edited by Dr John Kellogg. So here’s the worry. Type the popular mantras into Google today, and you discover that many of the studies asserting them are supported and funded by the manufacturers of breakfast cereals.

As a simple experiment, on 24 October 2015 I typed ‘breakfast’ into Google Scholar and downloaded the first ten papers that were medical or biological and which were fully accessible online. Of those ten papers, would you like to guess how many were funded, at least in part, by Kellogg, General Mills, Nestlé or some other food company? The answer is given in the footnote.fn1

Breakfast is big business: global breakfast cereal sales are expected to reach $43.2 billion annually by 2019, up from $32.5 billion in 2012, and the North American market alone was worth $13.9 billion in 2012. But that North American market is now mature, which is why manufacturers now target the emerging world.2 Of course they do: the breakfast cereal business is a great business; the raw product (grain or rice) is cheap but the final product on the supermarket shelves is not so cheap.

The fast food breakfast market is also big and growing. Dominated by McDonald’s, it was worth $31.7 billion in 2012 in North America, and between 2007 and 2012 its sales increased by 4.8 per cent annually.3 Fast food = meat = protein, and that message is now so strong that Kellogg’s has entered that market, to sell Kellogg’s Special K Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich Sausage, Egg and Cheese.4 These sandwiches, which are designed to be microwaved at home, look to English eyes like hamburgers. They are so small as to each deliver only 240 calories, but each sandwich also delivers 820 mg sodium (over 2 g of actual salt) which is a third of the daily recommended intake, and as most people would eat two Flatbread Sandwiches for breakfast, they will not only have consumed a gratuitous meal, they will also have consumed two-thirds of their daily allowance for salt before leaving the house in the morning.5 Still, the packet boasts a pretty photograph of two slices of orange placed alongside the Kellogg’s Special K Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich Sausage, Egg and Cheese.

Research funded by companies tends to produce results that are favourable to those companies: there will rarely be actual dishonesty on the part of the scientists, but nonetheless a bias can creep into the published findings. Consider the pharmaceutical industry. There is a class of drugs known as ‘calcium-channel antagonists’ that are prescribed for heart disease, and over the years at least seventy clinical studies on these drugs have been published by university professors and practising doctors. Some of those studies were funded by the manufacturers, while others were funded by independent sources including charities, government research agencies and hospitals, and in 1998 a group of investigators from the University of Toronto found: ‘A strong association between scientists’ opinions about safety and their financial relationships with the manufacturers. Supportive scientists were much more likely than critical scientists to have financial associations with the manufacturers.’6

University professors and practising doctors, therefore, publish findings that support their sources of research money. Repeated surveys of scientists’ publications have confirmed this finding, which is why journals now require the authors of papers to list their sources of research income and consultancies. Yet such listings can still leave the reader adrift: does an industrial association negate a researcher’s work, or can they be trusted anyway?