Photo by Nyana Stoica on Unsplash

Breakfast: Essential or Not?

Vicki McCash Brennan
4 min readJan 29, 2020

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Pity the poor cereal makers. Ditto pork farmers, with their sugar-added sausage and bacon. And the egg farmers, too.

After 125 years of investment in selling breakfast — and convincing the public that breakfast is the most important meal of the day — what’s the hottest diet trend of 2020?

Skipping breakfast.

Call it what you like: Intermittent fasting. Time-restricted fasting. Overnight fasting. If you try any sort of fasting at all, the meal you miss is breakfast.

That’s not an entirely bad thing. Breakfast typically is the most sugar-laden of all meals, often more like dessert than dinner in its nutritional composition. Even if you start the day with a smoothie or a cup of yogurt instead of Cap’n Crunch or Frosted Flakes, your breakfast will still give you a sugar jolt.

Good bye to all that! Who needs it?

I do. I have always been a breakfast eater. I wake up hungry. (Also, I love toast.) If I believe the science supporting breakfast, the reason I’m hungry in the morning is because my hormones are in check. I’m supposed to feel hungry in the morning, according to studies cited in It Starts With Food, the book that launched the Whole30 empire in 2012.

During three rounds of Whole30 over the past two-and-a-half years, I learned to eat big, meaty, low-sugar, vegetable-filled breakfasts. They kept me from getting hungry later in the day, and even kept me from missing my morning toast too much. When I was trying to stick to “Food Freedom Forever” in the Whole30 parlance, I continued a habit of low-sugar breakfast. When I took on the New York Times’ New Year’s Sugar Challenge in January, guess what? It called for a low-sugar breakfast as the first recommendation.

But do I need to eat breakfast?

According to research that up until recently has been generally accepted as fact, there are good reasons to eat breakfast: It boosts your energy level, balances your metabolism, and stimulates the brain.

Here’s the confounding thing about nutrition research. For every study indicating that you should eat breakfast as part of an overall plan for good health, there are other studies that say you don’t need an early meal every day. It’s not bad for you to go 14 to 16 hours between your last meal of one day and the first meal of the next.

It’s not bad for you to skip a meal if you are not hungry. It might even be good for you to let your body rest between meals. The science behind fasting is laid out in excruciating detail in The Complete Guide to Fasting, by Jason Fung, M.D., whose work may have started this whole fasting trend.

As with most trends, it’s hard to know what’s right. It wasn’t so long ago that diet gurus were telling us to eat all the time, three meals and three snacks a day. I never thought that was a good idea — too easy to overeat. That earnest advice is completely contrary to the advice to not eat at all for two-thirds of every day. What to do?

Lately I’ve been trying to exercise before breakfast and eat a light, low-sugar snack as my first meal of the day. This schedule means I’m fasting for 14 to 16 hours most days. I took off seven pounds the first week I tried it, but I was also avoiding added sugar and alcohol, so I can’t say fasting was the only reason for the loss. The following week, my weight stablized and I haven’t lost any since.

Waiting until lunchtime to break your fast is one way to keep the sugar out of your diet, which is far more important for your health than eating within an hour of waking. If you wait for lunch, you can have a healthy salad, a poke bowl, an omelet, or something left over from your healthy dinner last night. Having lunch as your first meal makes it easier to think of your “break-fast” as whatever kind of food is healthiest, not a donut or a bowl of cereal.

Honestly, it does not matter when you eat. How much you eat and what you eat are far more important for optimum health.

We do know what to eat. It is not complicated, despite what food and diet marketers would have you believe.

Eat real food, food that is closest to what it looks like in nature as possible. Eat more vegetables and fruits than anything else. Avoid added sugar and stay away from all processed foods, including all those non-meat vegan burgers and sausages that are this year’s other big food trend.

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Vicki McCash Brennan

Veteran journalist. Former high school teacher. Cancer survivor. Passions: health, yoga, cooking, reading, travel, and Florida.