[acb-hsp] Questioning the Importance of Breakfast

[peter altschul]

Is Everything You Learned About Breakfast Wrong?
  Ari LeVaux February 1, 2013st
  The institution of breakfast is rarely challenged.  It ranks 
somewhere between sleep and oxygen in reputed health benefit, and 
supposedly supplies irreplaceable energy to get you going, primes 
your metabolic system, keeps your muscles healthy, feeds your 
brain, and generally prepares you for the day to come.  But what 
if the age-old wisdom is an old wives tale? Recent studies 
suggest that at the very least, the benefits of breakfast are not 
so simple.
  For our purposes, breakfast means a meal eaten soon after 
waking, before going about one's daily business.  Thus, a 2 pm 
meal could be considered breakfast if you've just woken up, but 
not if you've been awake since 8 am.
  On Jan.  18, Nutrition Journal presented a study that suggests 
people will eat the same size meals at lunch and dinner 
regardless of how much they ate for breakfast.  This challenges 
the conventional wisdom that if you skip breakfast, you'll gorge 
later to make up for it.
  The pro-breakfast camp had earlier found support in an October, 
2012 study at the Imperial College of London, which compared 
brain scans and caloric intake of 21 people who either ate or 
skipped breakfast.  As Medical News Today summarized the 
findings: "Skipping breakfast increased hunger, appeal of 
high-calorie foods and food intake at lunch."
  Implicit in studies like these is the assumption that we want 
to eat fewer calories, which is understandable given how many 
people consume more calories then they burn-i.e., they're 
overweight.  But regardless of the impact, or lack thereof, that 
breakfast may have on total daily caloric intake, there are other 
factors to consider regarding breakfast-like how hungry you are, 
and how a meal makes you feel first thing in the morning.
  Another recent study looked at the differences between 
exercising on a full or empty stomach.  In late January, the 
British Journal of Nutrition published a paper that suggests 
exercise before breakfast burns 20 percent more body fat than the 
same workout after breakfast.  The study also determined that 
people who exercise before breakfast do not consume additional 
calories or experience increased appetite during the day.
  Doctoral student Javier Gonzalez, part of the team, told 
Science Daily: "In order to lose body fat we need to use more fat 
than we consume.  Exercise increases the total amount of energy 
we expend, and a greater proportion of this energy comes from 
existing fat if the exercise is performed after an overnight 
fast."
  A recent study in the International Journal of Obesity, 
meanwhile, found that people who eat their first meal before 3 
p.m.  eat fewer total calories than folks who waited until 
afterward to break their fast.  I'm not sure what that has to do 
with breakfast, but I guess if you were up until five eating 
tapas, that's about right.  In any case, the researchers 
speculate that the relationship between the body's sleep and 
eating cycles could play a role in how hormones control what the 
body does with food in its digestive system.
  Bodybuilder and blogger Martin Berkhan forced himself to eat 
breakfast for years, buying into the conventional wisdom that one 
must eat 5 to 8 times a day to preserve muscle mass.  Nowadays 
doesn't break fast until mid-afternoon, following his daily 
weightlifting routine.  Berkhan credits skipping breakfast for 
helping him not only reach his fat loss goals, but his 
muscle-building goals too.  He calls working out on an empty 
stomach "Fasted Training," a practice he writes about in his 
blog, Leangains.
  In a recent post called "Why Does Breakfast Make Me Hungry?" 
Berkhan wonders why different people react so differently to 
breakfast.
  "For me and many others out there, skipping breakfast keeps 
hunger away far better than eating in the morning-paradoxically 
enough...Why is it that some people are better off not eating 
anything at all in the morning? How can you be better off with 
zero calories than hundreds of calories under these specific 
conditions?"
  His heavily-cited hypothesis is based on a phenomena called the 
cortisol awakening response, in which levels of the hormone 
cortisol are elevated in the morning, to help you wake up.  
Cortisol increases blood sugar.  How your body deals with that 
increased blood sugar, according to Berkhan, determines how well 
you do on breakfast.
  I've tried skipping breakfast, and I've tried fasted training, 
and I might not ever go back.  When exercising, I'm much better 
running on empty.  My gastrointestinal system is not the 
well-oiled machine it once was, and when my belly is full of food 
it can get in the way of physical activity.  For movement, an 
empty belly can be liberating.
  Eating habits change over a lifetime.  There's a big difference 
between when you're young, growing, and basically hungry all the 
time, and when you hit the fattening 40's, like I recently have.  
It would be easy to keep eating like I used to, out of habit and 
momentum, but if I listen to my gut, I'm less hungry than I used 
to be, especially in the morning.
  It took me a while to break through the headwind of breakfast 
cheerleaders, and the idea that by skipping breakfast I might as 
well be playing Russian roulette for a living.  But I feel great, 
don't miss breakfast, and the paunch has waned.  Hopefully more 
pieces of the breakfast puzzle will soon be unpacked, and we can 
move beyond simple dogma.  What you eat and how much, and when 
you sleep, eat, and exercise all play roles how your food is 
digested.
  Wading through all of the emerging data can be confusing, but 
your gut is the final arbiter, so listen to it.  I'm going to 
continue skipping breakfast because morning is the one time of 
day that my belly is completely at peace.  No bloating, gurgling, 
burping, heart-burned and aching addiction to breakfast.  I'm not 
eating until I'm hungry.