Whether breakfast is important or not, whether we should eat it or not

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), author: SF

The original title: "it's not healthy to skip breakfast?" This may be a prejudice. "

According to health guidelines, skipping breakfast can lead to weight gain and harm to your health. Is this really the case? Is breakfast important in the end and should we eat it?

(Michael Mosley / tr. by Phil Newell)

Editor | Liu Jiayu

We often talk about the dangers of skipping breakfast. A great day starts with breakfast? Skipping breakfast will lead to weight gain? This is part of the health guidelines provided by the UK Public Health Department and the National Health Service (NHS). But what's the truth?

Skipping breakfast may not affect your health? A great deal of evidence shows that eating breakfast is good for human health. In 2018, a study by the German Diabetes Center (German Diabetes Centre) found that when a group of people who skipped breakfast were compared with a group of people who ate breakfast, they were not only fatter, but also had a 33% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

However, we should not assume that all this is caused by skipping breakfast just because people who do not eat breakfast are often unhealthy. In fact, people who regularly eat breakfast smoke less, drink less and are more energetic than those who skip breakfast, and these factors may be much more important than eating breakfast.

Eating breakfast may lead to more calories? The best way to figure this out is to conduct a randomized controlled trial in which people who skip breakfast eat breakfast, and vice versa, so as to clarify the causal relationship between eating breakfast and health.

Many such randomized controlled trials have been conducted, and in general, allowing people who originally skipped breakfast to eat breakfast may be counterproductive. This may be bad news for proponents of the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

In 2019, the British Medical Journal (British Medical Journal) published an analysis that showed that although people who skipped breakfast ate more later in the day, they also ate fewer calories than a formal breakfast.

In fact, in this study, scientists found that people who skipped breakfast ate an average of 260 fewer calories per day and weighed 0.44 kilograms less than those who ate breakfast. The researchers then concluded: "eating breakfast may be counterproductive for adults who are following the doctor's advice to lose weight."

Skipping breakfast does no harm. Tim Spector, a professor at King's College London, has published an article that further supports this claim. In his opinion, it is debatable whether breakfast is good or not. And he also pointed out that through a large number of daily observations, the benefits of eating breakfast to children are negligible, and it is biased to say that eating breakfast is equally important to adults and children.

So, if you like breakfast, enjoy it. If you don't like breakfast, there's no harm in eating later.