Yikes, I hate to be "that" person, but when I pulled up that link it was worse than a paywall. They said I can either subscribe, or whitelist them on my adblocker. No preview of the content or anything.
No thanks, I'll take a pass on the malware this time and just read the comments from people willing to get through on here.
Honestly, how are they obnoxious? They're asking you to pay for a service. I wish there were more paywalls in online journalism. Low-quality ad-funded journalism is how we get clickbait and crap like the Huffington Post.
Not the grandparent, but I don't run an ad blocker, which is how I "pay" for the sites. I do run NoScript, but I'll enable sites like the NYT.
It's sad how the entitlement mentality convinces people that they not only have the right to consume all media on the web for free, but they also have the absolute, inalienable right to view it without looking at ads. Because the
It seems very juvenile to me. "I want everything for free, even if it does cost money to create, and if I can't have it free, I'm going to post to complain about it!"
I've survived 21 years on the internet with no AdBlock, until 1 week ago a horrible TalkingPointsMemo link that autoplayed shit all over the place was the final straw.
But using AdBlockPro, I had no issues with this link.
This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Studies that support his conclusion, while flawed, are probably right. Studies that oppose it are obviously tainted by various problems.
The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'.
This is honestly just a low-quality, cherry-picked opinion piece by someone who really doesn't like breakfast.
"X is good for you" is not typically a universal statement, but a probabilistic one. It doesn't have to be good for every single person in every single circumstance in order to be correct. It merely needs to be better for most people.
For example, not being overweight is good for you. The existence of people who survive famine because they started out obese doesn't disprove that.
"Breakfast is good for you" implies that it has some benefit. In some cases, however, the cost of eating breakfast is greater than its benefit.
For instance, if you have to get to work at 5am, are you better off waking up earlier to eat breakfast? In this case, the cost of lost sleep may be greater than the benefit of breakfast.
The NYT article points out that many of the studies that claim breakfast is good may be flawed. If that's true, then we are likely overestimating the benefit of breakfast. And that means that in many cases where we thought
Yes, of course. I don't disagree with that at all. I'm just saying that "breakfast is good for you" is not disproven merely by showing that it's not always good for you.
Well there is no shortage of people who like breakfast (or are in charge of selling people breakfast) and hand wave about it being "the most important meal of the day". The truth is probably people have different metabolisms and if you are hungry in the morning you should eat and if you are not you shouldn't.
And that's almost exactly what this post suggests:
> The bottom line is that the evidence for the importance of breakfast is something of a mess. If you’re hungry, eat it. But don’t feel bad if you’d rather skip it, and don’t listen to those who lecture you. Breakfast has no mystical powers.
And again other people may have metabolisms that need to be "kick started" in the morning by breakfast, to keep a stable bloodsugar level during the day.
>The truth is probably people have different metabolisms and if you are hungry in the morning you should eat and if you are not you shouldn't.
Bodies don't always cooperate, if you are going to exercise strenuously in a given day you had better eat some kind of breakfast whether your body feels like it or not.
Breakfast is always going to be the opportunity to eat when you have more of the day ahead of you. That's true by definition, and it's the principle behind the chestnut about it being the most important meal of the day. There isn't much more to it than that.
>if you are going to exercise strenuously in a given day you had better eat some kind of breakfast whether your body feels like it or not
Or what? As someone who has undertaken week long fasts while participating in competitive sports with no discernible performance difference, I'm skeptical. Your body doesn't "run out of fuel" because you haven't eaten for 12 hours.
Everyone is different. These rules of thumb, including breakfast being extra special, are silly.
Well, it runs out of certain kinds of fuel. But luckily, evolution gifted us with multiple Plan B's to prevent silly malnourished mammals from keeling over the first time they missed a meal!
Meh, I did 4 hours driving followed by 4 or 5 hours of whitewater kayaking on Saturday, with hardly anything to eat until afterwards. (I have been doing a bit of intermittent fasting the last couple of years, and that seems to help in such situations).
>Bodies don't always cooperate, if you are going to exercise strenuously in a given day you had better eat some kind of breakfast whether your body feels like it or not.
I've done many multi-day hikes and a 24 mile one-day hike. I can confirm that eating breakfast before setting out in the morning is absolutely crucial. Like the old saying goes, an army marches on its stomach.
I'm normally not hungry in the morning, so this was a challenge. The few times I did skip breakfast on these hikes, I had to stop half-an-hour in to correct my mistake, as I felt completely drained.
> I've done many multi-day hikes, and a 24 mile one-day hike. I can confirm that eating breakfast before setting out in the morning is absolutely crucial. Like the old saying go, an army marches on its stomach.
Shockingly, people are different. I much prefer a snack on the trail to breakfast before.
It probably depends a lot on when people eat dinner. I sometimes eat dinner at 5-6pm and then I definitely need breakfast. If I eat at 8-9pm, I usually skip breakfast. But I've sort of stopped with the whole "you must have 3 meals per day" at these designated increments and I simply eat when I'm hungry, regardless of the time.
>This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right."
Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it.
(a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the effect of breakfast on obesity to look specifically at this issue. They first noted that nutrition researchers love to publish results showing a correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity.
(b) However, they also found major flaws in the reporting of findings. People were consistently biased in interpreting their results in favor of a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity. They improperly used causal language to describe their results. They misleadingly cited others’ results. And they also improperly used causal language in citing others’ results.
(c) Few randomized controlled trials exist. Those that do, although methodologically weak like most nutrition studies, don’t support the necessity of breakfast.
(d) Further confusing the field is a 2014 study (with more financial conflicts of interest than I thought possible) that found that getting breakfast skippers to eat breakfast, and getting breakfast eaters to skip breakfast, made no difference with respect to weight loss. But a 1992 trial that did the same thing found that both groups lost weight. A balanced perspective would acknowledge that we have no idea what’s going on.
(e) Many of the studies are funded by the food industry, which has a clear bias. Kellogg funded a highly cited article that found that cereal for breakfast is associated with being thinner. The Quaker Oats Center of Excellence (part of PepsiCo) financed a trial that showed that eating oatmeal or frosted cornflakes reduces weight and cholesterol (if you eat it in a highly controlled setting each weekday for four weeks).
Your comment however, reads exactly like you describe his, but for the opposite preference.
I think you missed the point - the way I understood parent, he tried to point out that many of the articles about "healthy" food consumption are financed by food industry and should be more or less ignored.
In the case of "eat" you may be right, if you want to seriously lose weight you should probably adopt a structured eating plan.
In terms of "consume" in general, there is an intense commercial pressure to get you to "consume" more. Oddly you don't see ads pressuring you to eat lunch or eat dinner, although Taco Bell used to advertise "fourthmeal" for a while.
I think they meant "Don't eat when you aren't hungry" rather than "Always eat when you're hungry". The first seems obviously true, while the second is something that I don't think anybody argues.
The disconnect between hunger and the need to eat may be an artifact of the separation of flavor from nutrition in modern, engineered "foods". To me it seems that hunger must have evolved as a fundamental signal to do or not do exactly what it's about (eat) but that it's been disrupted by modern developments.
I'd argue both. "Don't eat when you aren't hungry" is very often violated because eating is social activity. I also don't see why would everybody agree on "Always eat when you're hungry". I think it's better to drink a glass of water (or tea) or milk when you are hungry or do something else instead like going somewhere where you should be, doing something you should do or just playing a game.
What does depletion of glycogen have to do with hunger/being "physiologically fine"? People who are ketotic after about 1 or 2 days, or people who have just hit "the wall" during an ultra-long workout, don't have much glycogen to go on, but still get hungry just fine.
(a), (b), (d), and (e) are where he's argued that support for "breakfast is good" is methodologically weak, but then he goes and brings out (c) as an argument for his conclusion, while also being methodologically weak at the same time.
You've also neglected to mention (f), where the author discusses studies that show that breakfast is beneficial to children and then handwaves both of them away:
> What about the argument that children who eat breakfast behave and perform better in school? Systematic reviews find that this is often the case.
and
> It has been found that children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight than children who eat two breakfasts.
> One of the reasons that breakfast seems to improve children’s learning and progress is that, unfortunately, too many don’t get enough to eat. [...] It’s not hard to imagine that children who are hungry will do better if they are nourished.
Seems a pretty valid point as opposed to handwaving. Nutrition research in general has a pretty studious history of ignoring results in an attempt to support pre-existing conclusions.
In those studies, they've probably failed to control for children who qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch, which is a good proxy for children who don't get enough to eat for lunch. I suspect the correlation would go away if that were controlled for.
>but then he goes and brings out (c) as an argument for his conclusion, while also being methodologically weak at the same time.
Here's the thing though: he has every scientific and methodological right to do so.
It's those making a claim (that breakfast is good) that have to prove it.
If they fail to provide evidence for their claim, those who like the author merely point out that their research is weak don't have to prove breakfast is neutral.
Once you have carefully looked in the obvious places, contrary to the proverb, absence of evidence is evidence of absence - not very strong evidence, but still.
With the attention paid to this topic, if no causal relationship has been found, then it does imply (though not conclusively) that in most circumstances breakfast does not have any strong, meaningful beneficial (or magical) effect.
I can personally confirm that I used to have a strong correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity. Back when I used to eat a big pizza at 11 pm followed by some beer I could never eat the next morning because I was still full, so I skipped breakfast and didn't eat until lunchtime.
However, the skipped breakfast was not the cause of my overweight, but simply the result of eating far too much in the evening. So maybe there actually is a correlation, but as always: Correlation does not imply causation.
>"I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right.
Its more like "I don't eat breakfast, because I'm not hungry at that time". In your haste to paint the author as biased, you ended up sounding the same.
There is a very large following of Intermittent Fasting in the bodybuilding community. Tens/hundreds of thousands of consistent weightlifters who do not eat breakfast or lunch and put on impressive mass. Your body doesn't care about daily fluctuations, calories in/calories out, count your macros. Fin.
IF is great for reducing body fat percentage while increasing muscle mass, but someone starting the day with protein will increase muscle at a faster rate.
There are more and less literal understandings of words. Breakfast, as commonly understood, is meant as the first meal of the day, and specifically the morning meal.
Referring to your first meal, at 8pm without having slept away the day, as "breakfast" is outside most people's understanding of the word, though it is, strictly speaking, correct.
It's like the various meanings and uses of the word "decimate". The literal and historical meaning is to remove 1 out of 10 of a group, such as in combat against enemy forces or as punishment of some group or something. Today, it means removing a large percentage. "The army was decimated" today means that a large percentage (subjective) was killed or wounded.
Subjective meaning: Some might say 10% is large, others might mean 80%. And it depends on the initial size. 10% of 100 is only 10, that doesn't seem large. But 10% of 1,000,000 is 10,000, that's substantial though the percentage itself may appear small.
Taking your question seriously, yes. Two major schools of thought are "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive". This terms are usually applied to the noun "grammar" but it works for vocabulary, too. See: http://amyrey.web.unc.edu/classes/ling-101-online/tutorials/...
Descriptively, breakfast is clearly an early-morning meal eaten within an hour or two of the end of sleep. There is also, at least in America where I can speak for it, a set of associated "breakfast foods", making it reasonable to "have breakfast for dinner" and most people know what you mean. (i.e., even my 5-year-old knew precisely what that meant when I first said it, so one should carefully consider one's internet-pedant options before claiming that makes no sense :) ) Prescriptively one could make a case for "the meal that breaks your fast", though I daresay it would be a rather weak case. The term "fast" is almost dead in modern American English, though it may be making a comeback via things like Intermittent Fasting: https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-beginners-guid... (Which, for the purposes of this post, I'm merely pointing out a word usage. Though I do it myself now, I'm not defending or advocating it here.)
I believe he's being uncharitable to the descriptive point of view when he calls the prescriptive point of view the "words have meaning" point of view.
To flip the bias there, you could call the prescriptive point of view the "words have meaning ordained by God and it doesn't matter what anyone actually says" point of view, and call the descriptive point of view the "evidence-based" point of view.
When people say "breakfast", do they mean the moment of breaking one's fast? A prescriptivist would say "yes, obviously, it's right there in the word". A descriptivist would say "probably not, because everybody understands what it means to 'skip breakfast'."
Or rather from the "words have a meaning consisting of the combined meanings of their root words, or in the case of compound words, the combined meanings of their constituent words" - summarized as the "silly" point of view.
You don't break a fast anyway, it's a metaphor. You can only break physical things. You interrupt it. Wait, that just means between + break in Latin. That doesn't even make sense - you're ending the fast, not pausing it... but wait, aren't you pausing it - because eventually you'll cease eating. Maybe all words are just convenient labels using metaphors to help us remember them. Anarchy!
edit: I thought about it a little longer, and wondered if "end" might be a better word, then realized that was a physical metaphor too. I've finally settled on a word that makes strict sense: "terminate." From now on, the appropriate word for the first meal you eat after not eating, no matter the time of day or even whether there was a period during that time when you were sleeping (hence every single meal and every single snack) will be "fastermination." And you shouldn't look at me weirdly when I say that; I'm just using English (or Latin or whatever) properly, and in the grand scheme of things, I'm more right than you are.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I don't eat unless I'm hungry or going to be working out later (or have just worked out, which usually means I'm hungry). So Sundays, my lazy day, I sometimes don't eat breakfast until dinner. Sometimes not at all, because I just don't get hungry (on a particularly lazy Sunday especially). So when I go out with my friends on a Saturday or Sunday night it might be my first meal of the day. They're usually shocked.
As you mention French, interestingly, déjeuner literally means to stop fasting (dé-: prefix to stop or cancel, -jeuner : to fast).
edit: breakfast used to be called déjeuner, but it has been replaced by petit-déjeuner (little déjeuner literally) in some regions (including France). Other regions still call the first meal déjeuner.
No, just because breakfast is a compound word doesn't mean it must exactly match the two words it is composed of. Spearmint isn't mint leaves tied to a spear, Carhop doesn't involve jumping in any way, and understand doesn't involve standing anywhere let alone under anything.
So then when McDonald's introduced breakfast anytime and had ads about having breakfast for lunch and breakfast for dinner they were suggesting fasting all day until you got an egg mcmuffin for lunch or your end of day meal?
I don't disagree with the it started as first meal of the day regardless of time of day, but these days it is more likely to mean morning meal than it is first meal of the day.
He's completely right, the origin of "breakfast" is ending your nightly fast. It's been in use since at least the 15th century, prior to that (Old English) morgenmete was used; morning meal.
The same logic happens with the Portuguese word "desjejum", which can be broken in almost the same manner, meaning "that [meal] which breaks your fast (des+jejum).
Interestingly, in french, it's the same kind of roots (déjeuner, dé- (quite like the un- prefix in english), jeuner (fast)), but the word doesn't actually point to the morning meal, but instead, it points to lunch.
The word for the morning meal is "petit déjeuner", literally "small un-fast". Presumably, people were not having a morning meal a long time ago.
It seems pretty clear our understanding of diet is still in its infancy and news sites need to stop reporting every small piece of diet evidence as advice people should follow. Journalists in general need to do a much better job of explaining how robust new evidence is.
In each article they break down what the actual study was, how robust the evidence is and what it says in the context of other research which you never see in mainstream press.
For example, this article traces a flurry of headlines in the mainstream press about the importance of breakfast back to the original research and critically looks at the evidence in depth: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/08August/Pages/Breakfast-not%20t... It nearly always end in "needs further study" but it's sad there's no incentive for news outlets to have more accurate science reporting.
The problem is that I imagine getting any farther is extremely difficult, and I wouldn't be surprised if future breakthroughs come from the computational biology / geno/proteomics crowd instead.
"How does changing the raw materials going into this mind-bogglingly complex collection of biochemical processes we call a body affect the whole?" is a rather difficult question to answer.
I actually think it wasn't. It was our first foray into nutritionalism [1], which is the belief that foods can be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed and still be healthy. This has proven wrong over and over again. No matter how much we discover about what our foods contain, it's been consistent over the past 150 or so years that when we process food, it removes healthy stuff that doesn't get reintroduced when we try to add it back in.
The discovery of vitamins led to Wonder Bread, when we thought that we could make highly processed white flour healthy by adding vitamins. We now know that Wonder Bread, despite the vitamins, is one of the least healthy things you can put into your body since it basically converts directly to sugar. And that's just one example, the middle of a supermarket is replete with boxes of processed foods which claims to have added healthy stuff that have consistently made the people who consume them less healthy than the people who get their food from the produce and deli aisles, where there's no added vitamins and no such health claims.
If we've learned one immutable truth from recent health studies, it's that we're really bad at constructing foods that are healthier than what nature has already constructed. That's not to say that we shouldn't continue to try to learn about what's in the foods we eat, but that information should be used to constitute a diet of natural foods rather than foods engineered to be healthy.
Research, especially when it's reported without understanding like the media typically does, leads to fads that almost always turn out to be wrong. It's how we spent 4 decades trying to eat low fat which led to the highest obesity and diabetes rates ever. Meanwhile, those eating traditional diets based on the foods that their ancestors have eaten for generations are consistently healthier. Given that we know so much more about vitamins and minerals than they do, how is that they're so much healthier than us? If our understanding of vitamins hasn't made us healthier, is it really a big step forward?
I've never been so sad as when I read the New Yorker profile[1] of the creator of Soylent. Most people understand that food can be extremely healthful, and is a crucial part of culture and social bonding.
It's not so much the idea of smoothies or protein shakes or yogurt drinks or whatever (tasty) on-the-go nutrition you choose. It's the mentality around "lifehacking" and my work being too important and all-consuming to partake in the types of life activities that the muggles do.
> is a crucial part of culture and social bonding.
The average American meal is not a healthy, fulfilling group activity. Soylent is there to replace those meals and free up time and money to more frequently enjoy the other type of meal (or whatever else you might want to do with your time).
People were aspirationally eating the highly processed flour anyway. Adding vitamins made that healthier!
Nixtamalization is an easy example of a process that enhances nutrition. Perhaps the world would be better if people were not constrained to eating so much corn that it mattered, but that isn't the world we have. The list of beneficial processes goes on and on and on, but I like that one because it involves adding caustic chemicals to a starchy grain. Another good one is pickling. Controlled rotting with those hip probiotics!
The issue with modern food science isn't that it is over reductionist nonsense, it's that it is used to decrease satiation and increase palatability. It turns out that when huge resources are devoted to figuring out how to get people to eat more, you get results. I cringe every time I see Sabra Hummus advertise their great new idea, a fourth meal where you and your family cram Sabra Hummus in your mouth.
I certainly hope we can take our medical understanding of diet and nutrition to a place where it is easier to help people lead healthy lives, but I'm not going to sit here and look at the elimination of deficiency diseases as the start of some sort of modern disaster.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think it's important messages like this are out there to, at least, hamper the spread of unsupported messages like breakfast "being the most important meal". There's an insane amount of nutritional bullshit out there that has been perpetuated for generations.
Honestly, fasting for >16 hr/d >> eating breakfast, in my experience. Pet-theory is that you get a lil' neurotransmitter upregulation as an added benefit ;)
Anecdata, but I've found the same. I have more energy and better performance (for physical activity and cognitive activity) when I fast for the majority of the day.
Not a fan of gimmicky diets but my eating pattern seems similar to "the warrior diet", look it up if you're curious. I just think that in nature (if we were wild humans) we wouldn't have access to a huge meal right out of bed, We'd have to work hard all day to hunt and gather our food, then celebrate as a group with a food orgy around the fire.... okay I got a bit carried away :P
Intermittent fasting is one of my favorite productivity hacks.
To anybody who decides they're going to try it: If you've gone through years of "6 meals a day" and suddenly fast for 24 hours, you're gonna have a bad time. Take it slow. Otherwise you'll feel cold, irritable, and distracted and will assume fasting is something only masochistic sociopaths can do.
Agreed. I fast before working out in the morning, and usually break the fast by noon. On weekends I'll often eat breakfast and then fast the rest of the day.
I'm a woman, and on birth control, so fasting doesn't mess with my hormones so much, but I read that women tend to respond to fasting with heightened color vision and vivid sensorial experiences, which I can anecdotally confirm.
That said, I can only practice intermittent fasting for one to two days at a time before it starts negatively affecting my workouts and attention span.
"Breakfast isn't magical" isn't a polarized position. The polar opposite of "breakfast is magical" is "breakfast is evil", a position this article is at pains not to take.
It's the perfect opposite if you look at both words the way you have to look at them when they appear in writing about nutritional science. There, both could only ever be used as deliberate exaggerations of the healthy/unhealthy dichotomy, because neither Hogwarts nor James Bond supervillains have a place there.
In the case of articles like this one, it's because a lot of old propaganda, superstition, myths and common sense lessons deriving from apocryphal tales last forever, and are impervious to new information (or more often the ending of the suppression of old information.)
One of the reasons they are so hard to update is because these same media outlets and government agencies were the ones that foisted the myths on us in the first place, usually for money, and they are now telling us the truth about some things with the same tone as they told us the lies.
I'm sure there are many breakfast food manufacturers who would vehemently disagree with this article.
I recall hearing a story about how the father of modern public relations and propaganda (Eddie Bernays) played a key role in making sure that bacon and eggs were a part of an American breakfast. You can watch him in this interview explain how he created and manipulated a poll of 5,000 physicians to convince the public they should be eating a heavy breakfast consisting of bacon and eggs.
Bacon and eggs is still better than a sugar-blasted bowl of breakfast cereal, which it seems we are thankfully getting away from as the default breakfast.
Of course that's not what they taught us in school, which was that we were supposed to have a pile of carbs with more carbs sprinkled on top and wash it down with carb juice and milk. Bacon and eggs would kill you by clogging your heart with pan drippings.
Don't forget the advertisements that touted Sugary Cereal X as a "part of this complete breakfast"--which was not something that anyone would actually add cereal to if they already had one.
All the ads showed the bowl of cereal next to a 12oz glass of milk, an 8oz glass of orange juice, buttered toast, a colorful piece of fruit, maybe some jelly on the toast, and the cereal box. All the kids who actually ate it just got the cereal with some milk poured over it. It was dumped directly down the gullet with a funnel, because you only had 8 minutes left to get to the school bus stop, which was a 5 minute walk from your front door.
Do you have any citations on morning insulin resistance? Even a starting point would be appreciated. If not, I can search myself. I'm curious, as I just recently switched from a cereal-heavy w/ coffee breakfast to a strictly-smoothie w/o coffee breakfast (likely high in simple sugars, but I try to blend in at least something dark green). Initial results seem positive.
I have T1D and have firsthand knowledge of this. It's called the dawn phenomenon: certain hormones make the liver release glucose back into the bloodstream. I take extra insulin just to stay level. Now, while in a healthy person it's all taken care of automatically, I would still recommend not to compound things and give your pancreas a break.
The breakfast cereal industry has their own message devised by their own PR teams. I can't help but appreciate how this comment shifts the topic to a false dichotomy between the breakfast cereal industry and the breakfast meats industry.
Exactly. The best thing I ever did was take a piece of breakfast advice from an ultramarathoner's book. He advised eating salad for breakfast. It was weird, at first, but once I got used to it my energy levels for the entire day were improved. I've since begun eating my protein/fat-rich breakfast foods in the evening, before bed when the lack of carbohydrates makes it easier for me to sleep.
I'm eating the same healthy foods as before, but simply varying when I eat them and breaking free from the accepted norms of what to eat, when has had a marked effect on my energy and concentration. The usual YMMV, sample-of-one disclaimers apply, but I'd encourage people to play around with their notions of when certain foods should be consumed and see if there's a better option for you than what society suggests universally for everyone.
You are correct in that the American breakfast as we know it is one largely (in many senses of the word) invented to make us consume more.
Italian breakfast is a shot of espresso. Maybe a croissant if you're really that hungry. Then you get a monster lunch at noon.
Neither system is superior, it's just what works in either culture. Which is to say, there is no universal nutrition advice since everyone's body and microbiome and working culture is different. Pick and choose what works for you because only you process the food you eat.
As somebody who does weight lifting I can say from my experience that I performed much worse back then when I didn't take the time to eat a breakfast before going to the fitness studio.
I actually even had to stop the training sometimes because I had to vomit. (probably too low blood sugar)
During that time I made very slow progress.
Since I started to eat breakfast 2-3 hours before training I never had any issues and I also gain more weight (muscles)
> Since I started to eat breakfast 2-3 hours before training I never had any issues and I also gain more weight (muscles)
I think this is the important part. Breakfast (the morning meal) isn't the critical factor, it's having the nutrients (proteins, sugars, etc.) in your body when you need it. If you worked out in the evening, like me, you'd probably find that a decent sized lunch + a small mid-afternoon snack would be fine, breakfast optional.
I have also found that eating 2-3 hours before training (not necessarily breakfast) is optimal for full energy during the workout.
Being hungry is something that I'm very used to, but in the gym it's extremely counterproductive. Couldn't perform with more than ~85-90% of my maximum strength and just aborted the whole workout.
I can highly recommend "The diet myth" by Prof. Tim Spector, who does a good job in explaining why there are so many myths about nutrition, food, digestion etc:
I'd be interested to know whether the author eats in the evening. I don't think he mentioned one way or another. I don't eat anything after a light dinner and I usually wake up very hungry. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but if someone typically sleeps 6 to 8 hours starting at, say, Midnight, and the last meal prior to retiring was at 7 PM, that is 12-13 hours without food.
I typically go from 1900-2000 (dinner) to 1200 (lunch) the next day. Everyone is different, and then there's the fact that this is daily habit training. I start getting hungry around 1100 and 1800, because ¡surprise!, I typically eat about an hour later. I have no doubt that if I started eating breakfast when I woke up, I'd probably wake up hungry also.
EDIT: I should also point out that I trained myself to fast during college. One day a week I wouldn't eat at all. Now, when I get hungry, the feeling will last for a little bit then go away.
What is wrong with 12-13 hours without food? During the month of Ramadan Muslims do not eat or even drink for about that time and medical studies found no harm in general in doing that.
Nothing at all is wrong with it. I was simply conjecturing that perhaps some people who don't wake up hungry are eating within that period. I can see where any sort of regular daily fasting could span a similar period of time.
I usually fast for 16 hours a day, and I don't wake up hungry at all. Usually I only start to get hungry around the ~14-15 hour mark.
Hunger is something that can be trained, not simply a static phenomenon. There's a reason you get hungry when you smell something delicious. If you eat every day shortly after waking up, I'd certainly expect to be hungry at that time.
Yeah, when I was doing keto for weight loss for a few months, I just naturally ate one big meal in the evening, and usually a snack of almonds a few hours before. And that's it.
I was never particularly hungry during my accidental 16-ish hour "fast". In fact, I usually had to force myself to eat a bit extra just to bring my daily calorie count up to something reasonable.
My breakfast was magical - amazing smoked kippers, marmalade and toast, freshly roasted and ground filter coffee, a handful of fresh berries, and that was just the first course!
>I don’t eat breakfast...In fact, I’m rarely hungry until about lunchtime. So, other than a morning cup of coffee, I don’t eat much before noon.
This is fairly amusing. First, coffee is a well known appetite suppressant. Second, unless coffee is black it is probably far from zero calories, with dairy and sugar maybe between 200-300 [empty] calories which would be in the ball park of bacon and an egg.
Of course some starbucks drinks can easily be >600 calories so who knows, the author could be drinking a coffee every morning that is closer to the caloric equivalent of pancakes with syrup.
Or not. The effect of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is nowhere close to letting you skip a meal (that's what we are talking about when saying breakfast, not 5 corn flakes with a sip of milk). A lot of people take their tea/coffee without sugar and the calorie content of a table spoon of milk is negligible.
>The effect of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is nowhere close to letting you skip a meal
I don't know what you mean by saying caffeine doesn't let someone skip a meal, no one is asking permission. Most can skip a meal with or without caffeine, but the caffeine would only help curb hunger pains in those few hours before lunch. I am not suggesting caffeine has some magical properties (though we all know it does).
>A lot of people take their tea/coffee without sugar and the calorie content of a table spoon of milk is negligible.
Ok lets use your example of how a lot of people take their tea/coffee. A Starbucks 16oz coffee with no sugar and just 2% milk still has over 100 calories (120), just shy of a 12oz coke (140).
Clearly, whether or not that is negligible is sadly a matter of opinion more than science, because you say it is and I say its not. Consider this though, while sugar in coke is no doubt the larger health issue, you won't find to many people who say the amount of empty calories from a coke every day over a year is negligible (maybe just the Coke people themselves, but they will also say the sugar isn't an issue). Nevertheless, what you define as negligible calories is still more than an egg, still more than 2 pieces of bacon...and none of the nutritional value.
That's all milk though, and be sure you look at the unsweetened data.
A 16oz, Ice Coffee (which is what I prefer so that's what I'm posting), is a mere 5 calories[0] - drip coffee with no sweetener or splenda or some other low/no calorie sweetener would be the same.
>Second, unless coffee is black it is probably far from zero calories, with dairy and sugar maybe between 200-300 [empty]
Notwithstanding the fact that you and I tend to drink coffee black, we likely are in the minority. The fact that starbucks beverages are over 200 calories at a ratio of 5:1 tend to support my assumptions about the demands of the market (based on a sample of 51 starbucks beverages).
I think a lot of people took issue with my figures (200-300), but they are starbucks figures not mine. Still my point remains, even if an average coffee is 120 calories a number others have conceded who otherwise said I grossly exaggerated, I wouldn't consider that skipping breakfast insofar as one can have a very nutritious breakfast for that amount of calories (say 1 whole egg and 2-3 egg whites; even bacon and an egg).
2% of 16oz of milk is a bit less than 10 ml of milk and that would only be 6 Calories even for the full-fat whole milk in sale here in Europe.
Not sure how they manage to squeeze that amount of calories in their coffee but that is indeed some serious calories intake. People around me that take a breakfast take both a coffee and a breakfast. I wonder how much calories that would amount to at Starbuck, but I guess that would set me up for the whole day.
edit: Just looked at the website. Indeed 120 calories for their 16oz Americano. The 2% you mentioned is 2% fat milk, i.e. skimmed here. Another reason not to go to Starbuck I guess.
Notwithstanding the fact most people do not use half-milk, I think you can look at the fact the starbucks drinks are >200 calories at a rate of 5:1 as indicative of the market demands.
That drink is not just milk and coffee. It contains a flavored simple syrup and falls squarely in the realm of "coffee-flavored beverages".
> Notwithstanding the fact most people do not use half-milk, I think you can look at the fact the starbucks drinks are >200 calories at a rate of 5:1 as indicative of the market demands.
Honestly, the market demand is for coffee-flavored beverages, not for real coffee. Calling the majority of what Starbucks sells "coffee" is really pushing it. Conflating that shit with actual coffee, black or doctored, is ridiculous.
>Conflating that shit with actual coffee, black or doctored, is ridiculous.
Entirely my point...coffee can mean anything from zero calories black coffee to a 600+ calorie sugary sludge. Moreover, just because people claim they skip breakfast and only have coffee (such as the author), that does not mean they are consuming zero calorie black coffee.
It shouldn't be controversial my asking if it is really skipping a breakfast if they are consuming a beverage that exceeds the calories found in a nutritious breakfast. I'm surprised my observation has resulted in down votes, then again I assume my comments about people - as you eloquently state - conflating that shit with actual coffee, probably hits very close to home for a lot of people, and no one likes hearing their habits are unhealthy.
A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories. Nonfat brings it down to 80. A grande dark roast at Starbucks is 5 calories, 1 tsp of sugar is 16 calories, and 1oz of milk is 12 calories. Unless you're drinking milk and sugar with a splash of coffee, you won't get anywhere near 200-300 calories.
Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest drinks you'll find at Starbucks - only has 440 calories, so you'd need to really add a lot of syrups to get to >600.
Honestly, I used starbucks website to get my numbers, so maybe they are grossly inflating those numbers.
>Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest drinks you'll find at Starbucks - only has 440 calories, so you'd need to really add a lot of syrups to get to >600.
Example: Iced White Chocolate Mocha = 640 calories
>A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories.
I would say the 120 is fair for an average consumer on an average day and purposes of my point. I would still say that is a substantial amount of empty calories. Its really no different than having a 12 oz coke every morning from an empty calorie point of view. Again my main point is the calories from coffee didn't even enter the authors mind when even at 120 calories the coffee could easily replaced with a nutritious breakfast of say 1 whole egg and 2-3 egg whites (~120 calories).
Edit: a Google Search of "Starbucks nutritional information" shows a menu of 51 drinks of those 40 go above 200 calories (most well exceed 300) and only 11 can't be made to order above 200.
> I would still say that is a substantial amount of empty calories. Its really no different than having a 12 oz coke every morning from an empty calorie point of view.
So, in your opinion a glass of milk is empty calories, no different from a Coke?
Unlike sugary starbucks drinks, I never said milk was no different than coke.
Its not opinion, but by definition milk is not empty calories like sugary coffees and coke, because it contains nutritional value above food energy. But my opinion would be to avoid milk. Here is my quick analysis:
16 oz of milk is ~250 cal and ~25g of sugar, that is a lot of calories and sugar for the comparative nutritional value (minimal protein and vitamins). To put it in perspective that is 100% of the daily sugar intake suggested by the AHA yet only 1/3 the daily protein intake (for women).
Again one would be much better off replacing that 250 calories in a glass of milk for a breakfast of say 3 egg omelette with spinach (~250) on a daily basis because they would get much better nutritional value and avoid an inevitable sugar surplus. Really this circles around to my original point, if people are consuming even 100 calories from coffee in the morning, they are not really skipping a meal, because a healthy breakfast could come in 100 calories...that is an egg and slice of bacon or one egg omelette with a green vegetable.
So let me ask you if someone has a 120 calorie sugary coffee or 250 calorie glass of milk (100% daily sugar, 1/3 daily protein) in the morning, is that really the same as skipping a meal?
People who are college students, young professionals, esp. developers and entrepreneurs often work late into the night, either because they're partying or because they want to put that one problem to bed before they go themselves.
They often eat small snacks at night. Some wake up early, some wake up late, but many rush to work and forget breakfast.
As a result, their bodies adjust to intermittent fasting, and they actually have good calorie intake. Provided they don't eat junk food.
People who have been doing that since their early 20s are for the most part not overweight.
That's my theory. You could also do intermittent fasting by skipping dinner, but few night owls would do that. Instead, they eat dinner and some snacks at night, it digests overnight and they aren't hungry in the morning.
I'm also not hungry in the morning, but without breakfast I feel sleepy and often get headache. So I'm not sure what author was trying to prove here. Natural schedule and physiology is different from person to person.
'What made breakfast into a distinct meal dominated by cold cereal? Ad campaigns like the one that coined the phrase "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" in 1944.'
Breakfast became "magical" to me when I started eating high-protein breakfasts - basically eggs and bacon or sausage instead of cereal. The years I ate cereal for breakfast, I was battling to stay awake until lunch time. I felt so sleepy in class. Years later I moved to San Francisco and started eating eggs almost every day in SoMa cafes. I could not believe the difference. I was wide awake and had so much more energy.
I recently re-introduced chicken into my diet after 12 years after being a vegetarian. I started eating chicken breast for breakfast instead of the usual toast and peanut butter, and the difference in my energy level is astounding. I'm no longer carb-foggy, my digestion is much better, and I don't have to eat again until well into the afternoon or evening.
188 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadNo thanks, I'll take a pass on the malware this time and just read the comments from people willing to get through on here.
Maybe like a PayPal for Paywalls, to start a subscription with one click?
It's sad how the entitlement mentality convinces people that they not only have the right to consume all media on the web for free, but they also have the absolute, inalienable right to view it without looking at ads. Because the
It seems very juvenile to me. "I want everything for free, even if it does cost money to create, and if I can't have it free, I'm going to post to complain about it!"
But using AdBlockPro, I had no issues with this link.
The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'.
This is honestly just a low-quality, cherry-picked opinion piece by someone who really doesn't like breakfast.
For example, not being overweight is good for you. The existence of people who survive famine because they started out obese doesn't disprove that.
For instance, if you have to get to work at 5am, are you better off waking up earlier to eat breakfast? In this case, the cost of lost sleep may be greater than the benefit of breakfast.
The NYT article points out that many of the studies that claim breakfast is good may be flawed. If that's true, then we are likely overestimating the benefit of breakfast. And that means that in many cases where we thought
perceived_benefit(breakfast) > cost(breakfast)
it could actually be that
real_benefit(breakfast) < cost(breakfast)
Can you apply the same logic there?
And that's almost exactly what this post suggests:
> The bottom line is that the evidence for the importance of breakfast is something of a mess. If you’re hungry, eat it. But don’t feel bad if you’d rather skip it, and don’t listen to those who lecture you. Breakfast has no mystical powers.
> people have different metabolisms and if you are hungry in the morning you should eat and if you are not you shouldn't
Bodies don't always cooperate, if you are going to exercise strenuously in a given day you had better eat some kind of breakfast whether your body feels like it or not.
Breakfast is always going to be the opportunity to eat when you have more of the day ahead of you. That's true by definition, and it's the principle behind the chestnut about it being the most important meal of the day. There isn't much more to it than that.
Or what? As someone who has undertaken week long fasts while participating in competitive sports with no discernible performance difference, I'm skeptical. Your body doesn't "run out of fuel" because you haven't eaten for 12 hours.
Everyone is different. These rules of thumb, including breakfast being extra special, are silly.
I've done many multi-day hikes and a 24 mile one-day hike. I can confirm that eating breakfast before setting out in the morning is absolutely crucial. Like the old saying goes, an army marches on its stomach.
I'm normally not hungry in the morning, so this was a challenge. The few times I did skip breakfast on these hikes, I had to stop half-an-hour in to correct my mistake, as I felt completely drained.
Shockingly, people are different. I much prefer a snack on the trail to breakfast before.
Just like drinking when thirsty is drinking too late.
Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it.
(a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the effect of breakfast on obesity to look specifically at this issue. They first noted that nutrition researchers love to publish results showing a correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity.
(b) However, they also found major flaws in the reporting of findings. People were consistently biased in interpreting their results in favor of a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity. They improperly used causal language to describe their results. They misleadingly cited others’ results. And they also improperly used causal language in citing others’ results.
(c) Few randomized controlled trials exist. Those that do, although methodologically weak like most nutrition studies, don’t support the necessity of breakfast.
(d) Further confusing the field is a 2014 study (with more financial conflicts of interest than I thought possible) that found that getting breakfast skippers to eat breakfast, and getting breakfast eaters to skip breakfast, made no difference with respect to weight loss. But a 1992 trial that did the same thing found that both groups lost weight. A balanced perspective would acknowledge that we have no idea what’s going on.
(e) Many of the studies are funded by the food industry, which has a clear bias. Kellogg funded a highly cited article that found that cereal for breakfast is associated with being thinner. The Quaker Oats Center of Excellence (part of PepsiCo) financed a trial that showed that eating oatmeal or frosted cornflakes reduces weight and cholesterol (if you eat it in a highly controlled setting each weekday for four weeks).
Your comment however, reads exactly like you describe his, but for the opposite preference.
Exactly because the sense of hunger is not correlated with the exact need to eat is that we have obesity.
Eating only when hungry sounds like a good idea but then you get (usually fat) people complaining they are hungry all the time.
An average adult will spend around 12h (and probably more) physiologically fine without food, until its glycogen reserves are depleted.
In terms of "consume" in general, there is an intense commercial pressure to get you to "consume" more. Oddly you don't see ads pressuring you to eat lunch or eat dinner, although Taco Bell used to advertise "fourthmeal" for a while.
The disconnect between hunger and the need to eat may be an artifact of the separation of flavor from nutrition in modern, engineered "foods". To me it seems that hunger must have evolved as a fundamental signal to do or not do exactly what it's about (eat) but that it's been disrupted by modern developments.
Those people have no idea what is like to be actually hungry -- in the literal, haven't eater for 2 days sense.
They just have cravings.
You've also neglected to mention (f), where the author discusses studies that show that breakfast is beneficial to children and then handwaves both of them away:
> What about the argument that children who eat breakfast behave and perform better in school? Systematic reviews find that this is often the case.
and
> It has been found that children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight than children who eat two breakfasts.
> One of the reasons that breakfast seems to improve children’s learning and progress is that, unfortunately, too many don’t get enough to eat. [...] It’s not hard to imagine that children who are hungry will do better if they are nourished.
Seems a pretty valid point as opposed to handwaving. Nutrition research in general has a pretty studious history of ignoring results in an attempt to support pre-existing conclusions.
For support of last statement, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-ration (side note: military nutrition has a long and interesting involvement with civilian nutrition guidelines)
Here's the thing though: he has every scientific and methodological right to do so.
It's those making a claim (that breakfast is good) that have to prove it.
If they fail to provide evidence for their claim, those who like the author merely point out that their research is weak don't have to prove breakfast is neutral.
What if overweight children are more likely to skip breakfast?
With the attention paid to this topic, if no causal relationship has been found, then it does imply (though not conclusively) that in most circumstances breakfast does not have any strong, meaningful beneficial (or magical) effect.
However, the skipped breakfast was not the cause of my overweight, but simply the result of eating far too much in the evening. So maybe there actually is a correlation, but as always: Correlation does not imply causation.
Its more like "I don't eat breakfast, because I'm not hungry at that time". In your haste to paint the author as biased, you ended up sounding the same.
As a casual observer of this topic, it seems like breakfast is necessary for humans who want to grow: kids and people adding muscle mass.
If you want to lose weight or maintain breakfast can probably be skipped.
There is a very large following of Intermittent Fasting in the bodybuilding community. Tens/hundreds of thousands of consistent weightlifters who do not eat breakfast or lunch and put on impressive mass. Your body doesn't care about daily fluctuations, calories in/calories out, count your macros. Fin.
So I disagree with your casual conclusion.
It seems that your comment is equally handwavy :)
Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".
Referring to your first meal, at 8pm without having slept away the day, as "breakfast" is outside most people's understanding of the word, though it is, strictly speaking, correct.
It's like the various meanings and uses of the word "decimate". The literal and historical meaning is to remove 1 out of 10 of a group, such as in combat against enemy forces or as punishment of some group or something. Today, it means removing a large percentage. "The army was decimated" today means that a large percentage (subjective) was killed or wounded.
Subjective meaning: Some might say 10% is large, others might mean 80%. And it depends on the initial size. 10% of 100 is only 10, that doesn't seem large. But 10% of 1,000,000 is 10,000, that's substantial though the percentage itself may appear small.
Descriptively, breakfast is clearly an early-morning meal eaten within an hour or two of the end of sleep. There is also, at least in America where I can speak for it, a set of associated "breakfast foods", making it reasonable to "have breakfast for dinner" and most people know what you mean. (i.e., even my 5-year-old knew precisely what that meant when I first said it, so one should carefully consider one's internet-pedant options before claiming that makes no sense :) ) Prescriptively one could make a case for "the meal that breaks your fast", though I daresay it would be a rather weak case. The term "fast" is almost dead in modern American English, though it may be making a comeback via things like Intermittent Fasting: https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-beginners-guid... (Which, for the purposes of this post, I'm merely pointing out a word usage. Though I do it myself now, I'm not defending or advocating it here.)
To flip the bias there, you could call the prescriptive point of view the "words have meaning ordained by God and it doesn't matter what anyone actually says" point of view, and call the descriptive point of view the "evidence-based" point of view.
When people say "breakfast", do they mean the moment of breaking one's fast? A prescriptivist would say "yes, obviously, it's right there in the word". A descriptivist would say "probably not, because everybody understands what it means to 'skip breakfast'."
You don't break a fast anyway, it's a metaphor. You can only break physical things. You interrupt it. Wait, that just means between + break in Latin. That doesn't even make sense - you're ending the fast, not pausing it... but wait, aren't you pausing it - because eventually you'll cease eating. Maybe all words are just convenient labels using metaphors to help us remember them. Anarchy!
edit: I thought about it a little longer, and wondered if "end" might be a better word, then realized that was a physical metaphor too. I've finally settled on a word that makes strict sense: "terminate." From now on, the appropriate word for the first meal you eat after not eating, no matter the time of day or even whether there was a period during that time when you were sleeping (hence every single meal and every single snack) will be "fastermination." And you shouldn't look at me weirdly when I say that; I'm just using English (or Latin or whatever) properly, and in the grand scheme of things, I'm more right than you are.
In PT-BR, our term translates to "morning coffee", and in PT-PT translates as "little lunch" (from french, petit déjeuner).
(Actually we also have a translation for breakfast - desjejum - but its not commonly used.)
edit: breakfast used to be called déjeuner, but it has been replaced by petit-déjeuner (little déjeuner literally) in some regions (including France). Other regions still call the first meal déjeuner.
I don't disagree with the it started as first meal of the day regardless of time of day, but these days it is more likely to mean morning meal than it is first meal of the day.
You could refer to the concept of breakfast, the meal, and also the common food of breakfast, bacon and eggs, with the same word.
I love this website for health science news and wish there were more like it: http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
In each article they break down what the actual study was, how robust the evidence is and what it says in the context of other research which you never see in mainstream press.
For example, this article traces a flurry of headlines in the mainstream press about the importance of breakfast back to the original research and critically looks at the evidence in depth: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/08August/Pages/Breakfast-not%20t... It nearly always end in "needs further study" but it's sad there's no incentive for news outlets to have more accurate science reporting.
"How does changing the raw materials going into this mind-bogglingly complex collection of biochemical processes we call a body affect the whole?" is a rather difficult question to answer.
The discovery of vitamins led to Wonder Bread, when we thought that we could make highly processed white flour healthy by adding vitamins. We now know that Wonder Bread, despite the vitamins, is one of the least healthy things you can put into your body since it basically converts directly to sugar. And that's just one example, the middle of a supermarket is replete with boxes of processed foods which claims to have added healthy stuff that have consistently made the people who consume them less healthy than the people who get their food from the produce and deli aisles, where there's no added vitamins and no such health claims.
If we've learned one immutable truth from recent health studies, it's that we're really bad at constructing foods that are healthier than what nature has already constructed. That's not to say that we shouldn't continue to try to learn about what's in the foods we eat, but that information should be used to constitute a diet of natural foods rather than foods engineered to be healthy.
Research, especially when it's reported without understanding like the media typically does, leads to fads that almost always turn out to be wrong. It's how we spent 4 decades trying to eat low fat which led to the highest obesity and diabetes rates ever. Meanwhile, those eating traditional diets based on the foods that their ancestors have eaten for generations are consistently healthier. Given that we know so much more about vitamins and minerals than they do, how is that they're so much healthier than us? If our understanding of vitamins hasn't made us healthier, is it really a big step forward?
[1] https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-foo...
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food
The average American meal is not a healthy, fulfilling group activity. Soylent is there to replace those meals and free up time and money to more frequently enjoy the other type of meal (or whatever else you might want to do with your time).
Nixtamalization is an easy example of a process that enhances nutrition. Perhaps the world would be better if people were not constrained to eating so much corn that it mattered, but that isn't the world we have. The list of beneficial processes goes on and on and on, but I like that one because it involves adding caustic chemicals to a starchy grain. Another good one is pickling. Controlled rotting with those hip probiotics!
The issue with modern food science isn't that it is over reductionist nonsense, it's that it is used to decrease satiation and increase palatability. It turns out that when huge resources are devoted to figuring out how to get people to eat more, you get results. I cringe every time I see Sabra Hummus advertise their great new idea, a fourth meal where you and your family cram Sabra Hummus in your mouth.
I certainly hope we can take our medical understanding of diet and nutrition to a place where it is easier to help people lead healthy lives, but I'm not going to sit here and look at the elimination of deficiency diseases as the start of some sort of modern disaster.
Thoughts?
Not a fan of gimmicky diets but my eating pattern seems similar to "the warrior diet", look it up if you're curious. I just think that in nature (if we were wild humans) we wouldn't have access to a huge meal right out of bed, We'd have to work hard all day to hunt and gather our food, then celebrate as a group with a food orgy around the fire.... okay I got a bit carried away :P
To anybody who decides they're going to try it: If you've gone through years of "6 meals a day" and suddenly fast for 24 hours, you're gonna have a bad time. Take it slow. Otherwise you'll feel cold, irritable, and distracted and will assume fasting is something only masochistic sociopaths can do.
I'm a woman, and on birth control, so fasting doesn't mess with my hormones so much, but I read that women tend to respond to fasting with heightened color vision and vivid sensorial experiences, which I can anecdotally confirm.
That said, I can only practice intermittent fasting for one to two days at a time before it starts negatively affecting my workouts and attention span.
This is the attention economy: it's what you get when you combine news with capitalism.
One of the reasons they are so hard to update is because these same media outlets and government agencies were the ones that foisted the myths on us in the first place, usually for money, and they are now telling us the truth about some things with the same tone as they told us the lies.
I recall hearing a story about how the father of modern public relations and propaganda (Eddie Bernays) played a key role in making sure that bacon and eggs were a part of an American breakfast. You can watch him in this interview explain how he created and manipulated a poll of 5,000 physicians to convince the public they should be eating a heavy breakfast consisting of bacon and eggs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU
All the ads showed the bowl of cereal next to a 12oz glass of milk, an 8oz glass of orange juice, buttered toast, a colorful piece of fruit, maybe some jelly on the toast, and the cereal box. All the kids who actually ate it just got the cereal with some milk poured over it. It was dumped directly down the gullet with a funnel, because you only had 8 minutes left to get to the school bus stop, which was a 5 minute walk from your front door.
I'm eating the same healthy foods as before, but simply varying when I eat them and breaking free from the accepted norms of what to eat, when has had a marked effect on my energy and concentration. The usual YMMV, sample-of-one disclaimers apply, but I'd encourage people to play around with their notions of when certain foods should be consumed and see if there's a better option for you than what society suggests universally for everyone.
Italian breakfast is a shot of espresso. Maybe a croissant if you're really that hungry. Then you get a monster lunch at noon.
Neither system is superior, it's just what works in either culture. Which is to say, there is no universal nutrition advice since everyone's body and microbiome and working culture is different. Pick and choose what works for you because only you process the food you eat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syleh_6Aopw
I actually even had to stop the training sometimes because I had to vomit. (probably too low blood sugar)
During that time I made very slow progress.
Since I started to eat breakfast 2-3 hours before training I never had any issues and I also gain more weight (muscles)
I think this is the important part. Breakfast (the morning meal) isn't the critical factor, it's having the nutrients (proteins, sugars, etc.) in your body when you need it. If you worked out in the evening, like me, you'd probably find that a decent sized lunch + a small mid-afternoon snack would be fine, breakfast optional.
Being hungry is something that I'm very used to, but in the gym it's extremely counterproductive. Couldn't perform with more than ~85-90% of my maximum strength and just aborted the whole workout.
http://tim-spector.co.uk/
Therefore, it is better to have a good breakfast and lunch so you can skip dinner or have very light dinner (lean protein, veggies).
If you skip breakfast, you will have to eat dinner/late dinner. Goodbye good night sleep.
EDIT: I should also point out that I trained myself to fast during college. One day a week I wouldn't eat at all. Now, when I get hungry, the feeling will last for a little bit then go away.
Hunger is something that can be trained, not simply a static phenomenon. There's a reason you get hungry when you smell something delicious. If you eat every day shortly after waking up, I'd certainly expect to be hungry at that time.
I was never particularly hungry during my accidental 16-ish hour "fast". In fact, I usually had to force myself to eat a bit extra just to bring my daily calorie count up to something reasonable.
This is the real piece of truth in this article.
This is fairly amusing. First, coffee is a well known appetite suppressant. Second, unless coffee is black it is probably far from zero calories, with dairy and sugar maybe between 200-300 [empty] calories which would be in the ball park of bacon and an egg.
Of course some starbucks drinks can easily be >600 calories so who knows, the author could be drinking a coffee every morning that is closer to the caloric equivalent of pancakes with syrup.
Or not. The effect of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is nowhere close to letting you skip a meal (that's what we are talking about when saying breakfast, not 5 corn flakes with a sip of milk). A lot of people take their tea/coffee without sugar and the calorie content of a table spoon of milk is negligible.
I don't know what you mean by saying caffeine doesn't let someone skip a meal, no one is asking permission. Most can skip a meal with or without caffeine, but the caffeine would only help curb hunger pains in those few hours before lunch. I am not suggesting caffeine has some magical properties (though we all know it does).
>A lot of people take their tea/coffee without sugar and the calorie content of a table spoon of milk is negligible.
Ok lets use your example of how a lot of people take their tea/coffee. A Starbucks 16oz coffee with no sugar and just 2% milk still has over 100 calories (120), just shy of a 12oz coke (140).
Clearly, whether or not that is negligible is sadly a matter of opinion more than science, because you say it is and I say its not. Consider this though, while sugar in coke is no doubt the larger health issue, you won't find to many people who say the amount of empty calories from a coke every day over a year is negligible (maybe just the Coke people themselves, but they will also say the sugar isn't an issue). Nevertheless, what you define as negligible calories is still more than an egg, still more than 2 pieces of bacon...and none of the nutritional value.
A 16oz, Ice Coffee (which is what I prefer so that's what I'm posting), is a mere 5 calories[0] - drip coffee with no sweetener or splenda or some other low/no calorie sweetener would be the same.
[0] - http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/iced-coffee/iced-coffee...
>Second, unless coffee is black it is probably far from zero calories, with dairy and sugar maybe between 200-300 [empty]
Notwithstanding the fact that you and I tend to drink coffee black, we likely are in the minority. The fact that starbucks beverages are over 200 calories at a ratio of 5:1 tend to support my assumptions about the demands of the market (based on a sample of 51 starbucks beverages).
I think a lot of people took issue with my figures (200-300), but they are starbucks figures not mine. Still my point remains, even if an average coffee is 120 calories a number others have conceded who otherwise said I grossly exaggerated, I wouldn't consider that skipping breakfast insofar as one can have a very nutritious breakfast for that amount of calories (say 1 whole egg and 2-3 egg whites; even bacon and an egg).
Not sure how they manage to squeeze that amount of calories in their coffee but that is indeed some serious calories intake. People around me that take a breakfast take both a coffee and a breakfast. I wonder how much calories that would amount to at Starbuck, but I guess that would set me up for the whole day.
edit: Just looked at the website. Indeed 120 calories for their 16oz Americano. The 2% you mentioned is 2% fat milk, i.e. skimmed here. Another reason not to go to Starbuck I guess.
That is for a Cafe Misto, which is half-milk. Most people do not put nearly that much milk or cream in their coffee.
http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/iced-coff...
Notwithstanding the fact most people do not use half-milk, I think you can look at the fact the starbucks drinks are >200 calories at a rate of 5:1 as indicative of the market demands.
Just look at their list of best beverages[1]:
1. 540 cal/16oz 2. 470 cal/16oz 3. 250 cal/16oz 4. 360 cal/16oz 5. 190 cal/16oz 6. 440 cal/16oz 7. 250 cal/16oz 8. 380 cal/16oz 9. 440 cal/16oz 10. 35 cal (1.5oz)
[1]http://www.starbucksdrinks.com/best-starbucks-drinks-list
> http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/iced-coff...
That drink is not just milk and coffee. It contains a flavored simple syrup and falls squarely in the realm of "coffee-flavored beverages".
> Notwithstanding the fact most people do not use half-milk, I think you can look at the fact the starbucks drinks are >200 calories at a rate of 5:1 as indicative of the market demands.
Honestly, the market demand is for coffee-flavored beverages, not for real coffee. Calling the majority of what Starbucks sells "coffee" is really pushing it. Conflating that shit with actual coffee, black or doctored, is ridiculous.
Entirely my point...coffee can mean anything from zero calories black coffee to a 600+ calorie sugary sludge. Moreover, just because people claim they skip breakfast and only have coffee (such as the author), that does not mean they are consuming zero calorie black coffee.
It shouldn't be controversial my asking if it is really skipping a breakfast if they are consuming a beverage that exceeds the calories found in a nutritious breakfast. I'm surprised my observation has resulted in down votes, then again I assume my comments about people - as you eloquently state - conflating that shit with actual coffee, probably hits very close to home for a lot of people, and no one likes hearing their habits are unhealthy.
Is that a real thing or just figurative speech? Only pain I ever got from hunger was headache.
Pains is used interchangeably with pangs, but yes it is a real thing.
A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories. Nonfat brings it down to 80. A grande dark roast at Starbucks is 5 calories, 1 tsp of sugar is 16 calories, and 1oz of milk is 12 calories. Unless you're drinking milk and sugar with a splash of coffee, you won't get anywhere near 200-300 calories.
Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest drinks you'll find at Starbucks - only has 440 calories, so you'd need to really add a lot of syrups to get to >600.
>Even a peppermint mocha with whipped cream - pretty much one of the sweetest drinks you'll find at Starbucks - only has 440 calories, so you'd need to really add a lot of syrups to get to >600.
Example: Iced White Chocolate Mocha = 640 calories
>A grande Starbucks cappuccino is 120 calories.
I would say the 120 is fair for an average consumer on an average day and purposes of my point. I would still say that is a substantial amount of empty calories. Its really no different than having a 12 oz coke every morning from an empty calorie point of view. Again my main point is the calories from coffee didn't even enter the authors mind when even at 120 calories the coffee could easily replaced with a nutritious breakfast of say 1 whole egg and 2-3 egg whites (~120 calories).
Edit: a Google Search of "Starbucks nutritional information" shows a menu of 51 drinks of those 40 go above 200 calories (most well exceed 300) and only 11 can't be made to order above 200.
So, in your opinion a glass of milk is empty calories, no different from a Coke?
Its not opinion, but by definition milk is not empty calories like sugary coffees and coke, because it contains nutritional value above food energy. But my opinion would be to avoid milk. Here is my quick analysis:
16 oz of milk is ~250 cal and ~25g of sugar, that is a lot of calories and sugar for the comparative nutritional value (minimal protein and vitamins). To put it in perspective that is 100% of the daily sugar intake suggested by the AHA yet only 1/3 the daily protein intake (for women).
Again one would be much better off replacing that 250 calories in a glass of milk for a breakfast of say 3 egg omelette with spinach (~250) on a daily basis because they would get much better nutritional value and avoid an inevitable sugar surplus. Really this circles around to my original point, if people are consuming even 100 calories from coffee in the morning, they are not really skipping a meal, because a healthy breakfast could come in 100 calories...that is an egg and slice of bacon or one egg omelette with a green vegetable.
So let me ask you if someone has a 120 calorie sugary coffee or 250 calorie glass of milk (100% daily sugar, 1/3 daily protein) in the morning, is that really the same as skipping a meal?
People who are college students, young professionals, esp. developers and entrepreneurs often work late into the night, either because they're partying or because they want to put that one problem to bed before they go themselves.
They often eat small snacks at night. Some wake up early, some wake up late, but many rush to work and forget breakfast.
As a result, their bodies adjust to intermittent fasting, and they actually have good calorie intake. Provided they don't eat junk food.
People who have been doing that since their early 20s are for the most part not overweight.
That's my theory. You could also do intermittent fasting by skipping dinner, but few night owls would do that. Instead, they eat dinner and some snacks at night, it digests overnight and they aren't hungry in the morning.
But don't barrage me with "it's the most important meal of the day" old wife tales, when you don't understand my lack of hunger.
That sounds exactly like the thing the author tries to demonstrate: There isn't a clear-cut evidence that breakfast is important, or that it is bad.
http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/