13 ms·

There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

176 points by hvo 10y ago

MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
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.
- zodPod 10y ago
  No need to hate being that person! The bullshit paywalls are obnoxious! It's good to know I'm not the only one annoyed!
  - sd8f9iu 10y ago
    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.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - nkohari 10y ago
      Do you subscribe to all of the sites with paywalls?
      - EGreg 10y ago
        Why not make it simple? Maybe like a PayPal for Paywalls, to start a subscription with one click?
      - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
        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!"
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Interesting. I am getting no nagging or blocking at all with uBlock Origin. No ads either.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
    Weird, I'm using uBlock Origin and am getting the "whitelist us or pay" message.
- rconti 10y ago
  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.
paulpauper 10y ago
tldr: methodological flaws and conflicts of interest undermine supposed superiority of breakfast
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mmastrac 10y ago
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.
- IIlllIllIIIIlII 10y ago
  .
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 10y ago
    "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.
    - IIlllIllIIIIlII 10y ago
      "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 perceived_benefit(breakfast) > cost(breakfast) it could actually be that real_benefit(breakfast) < cost(breakfast)
      - 10y ago
gravypod 10y ago
Isn't the first meal that you eat in the day your "breakfast?" Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".
- cmurf 10y ago
  Yes from the "words have meaning" point of view, breakfast is unavoidable.
  - hawleyal 10y ago
    There are other points of view?
    - fragsworth 10y ago
      That "words have other meanings", like breakfast would be what you eat within X hours of waking up.
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      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.
    - jerf 10y ago
      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/understanding-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-grammar/ 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-guide-to-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.)
seanwilson 10y 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. I love this website for health science news and wish there were more like it: http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx 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%20the-most-important-meal-of-the-day.aspx 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.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I'd say it is at least a ways into adolescence. Understanding vitamins and trace minerals was a pretty big step forward.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    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.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    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? [1] https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-food-part-2-nutritionalism/ https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-foo...
pizza 10y ago
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 ;) Thoughts?
- brahmwg 10y ago
  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
- clessg 10y ago
  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.
- magicbeanss 10y ago
  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.
wmccullough 10y ago
Why does everything have to be so polarized anymore?
- steego 10y ago
  It sells more ads.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  It puts food on the table for journalists, gets politicians elected and is even career building for researchers. This is the attention economy: it's what you get when you combine news with capitalism.
- tptacek 10y ago
  "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.
  - rco8786 10y ago
    I'm not sure that "evil" is the opposite of "magic"
    - usrusr 10y ago
      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.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  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.
steego 10y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU
- douche 10y ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    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.
    - collyw 10y ago
      Is there any scientific evidence that carbs are bad? It seems to be true on the internet, but I would prefer to see some proper peer reviewed studies.
      - pessimizer 10y ago
        Carbs aren't bad, they're just calorie-rich, hard on the pancreas and less satisfying than not-carbs, so you eat more of them.
        collyw 10y ago
        They are as calorie rich as protein gram for gram, and less than half of fat. Have you any evidence for the other two claims?
malmsteen 10y ago
Pics of the author or GTFO. His body weight is probably the only thing that matters to that subject. Maybe he's overweight because of it.
StavrosK 10y ago
Also see this nice YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syleh_6Aopw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syleh_6Aopw
DominikR 10y ago
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)
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  > 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.
- geoka9 10y ago
  Fasting before working out may be good for cutting. But taking some BCAA or protein is recommended anyway. Bulking is unrealistic though.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  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.
fs111 10y ago
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: http://tim-spector.co.uk/ http://tim-spector.co.uk/
- streblo 10y ago
  FiveThirtyEight had an article about this recently: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you...
atonse 10y ago
I am just so unsettled by those broken yolks (I like my egg sunny side up), that I couldn't read the rest of the article.
mtw 10y ago
Eating requires a lot of energy. Eating too much in the evening will for example impact negatively your sleep. 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.
- fu9ar 10y ago
  [citation needed]
- witty_username 10y ago
  I sleep fine when I eat late, perhaps even better because my stomach is full and that feels good.
markbnj 10y ago
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.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  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.
- fpoling 10y ago
  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.
  - markbnj 10y ago
    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.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  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.
askyourmother 10y ago
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!
- internaut 10y ago
  Waffles at the right time with coffee can be magical.
jcoffland 10y ago
"As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies." This is the real piece of truth in this article.
will_brown 10y ago
>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.
- gutnor 10y ago
  > This is fairly amusing. 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.
  - will_brown 10y ago
    >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.
EGreg 10y ago
Here's what I think: 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.
UK-AL 10y ago
I'm a victim of this myth. I'm just not hungry in the morning. Some people love breakfast, and that's ok. 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.
Gonzih 10y ago
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.
- detaro 10y ago
  > So I'm not sure what author was trying to prove here. Natural schedule and physiology is different from person to person. 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.
- bluthru 10y ago
  That could also indicate that you are too dependent on carbs and therefore your brain has a difficult time on "fat burning mode".
Cozumel 10y ago
'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.' http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/ http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/
- swanson 10y ago
  Thanks! Was looking for a comment about this. So many of the long surviving 'myths' seem to be traceable back to an advertising campaign.
rabboRubble 10y ago
If I don't eat breakfast, I get a headache after I eat lunch. So for me breakfast is the equivalent of two Excedrin Migraine. Pure magic!
beamatronic 10y ago
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.
- magicbeanss 10y ago
  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.
emodendroket 10y ago
Well, magical or not, I do not want to be hungry until lunch.
- dionidium 10y ago
  The author doesn't get hungry before lunch. Maybe that seems weird to you, but it doesn't to me. I don't get hungry until lunch, either.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Not really weird, no. I felt that way when I was in high school. But now my habits have changed.
talles 10y ago
There's nothing magical about the way the author dismiss breakfast either. In the end it's an article where the author says that "breakfast research is flawed" and "I don't like breakfast". I'm disappointed on how the author missed intermittent fasting which, even not being scientific consensus, has many studies in favor of not breaking the fast.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rconti 10y ago
Heh. I'm a breakfast eater now. I used to not eat breakfast. I'd be starving at 11:45am when it was time to go out to lunch with my coworkers. I decided to make some changes in my diet so I wasn't so hungry for lunch and could make better choices. Started eating a healthy breakfast every morning. I was starving by 12:00pm. So, for my anecdatel point, I think it has more to do with when your body expects food than actual hunger.
mapt 10y ago
" This habit has forced me to be subjected to more lectures on how I’m hurting myself, my diet, my work and my health than almost any other. Only a fool would skip the most important meal of the day, right? As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies. " > Goes on to cite 2013 studies being wrong > Implies that "Our belief in the power of breakfast" dates to 2013 > Ignores the fact that our belief in the power of breakfast dates back to people like JR Kellog, 19th century food industrialist, 7th Day Adventist, and superintendant of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. One of the time's foremost authorities on health for the rich and famous, whom he lectured on the poison of meat & alcohol consumption and the ungodly plague of masturbation & orgasm, a guaranteed path to every disease known to man. He gave us calisthenics, grain-based breakfast, and also circumcision (though his clitorectomy and wire-based male chastity surgery did not catch on) based on his religious intuitions (stemming from the prophetic visions of Ellen G Wright) and social mores. Which were not, per se, peer reviewed to modern standards. They were marketed to consumers and the devout in an age of literal snake oil salesmen, in an era when doctors had a laughable corpus of knowledge. An impressive man, but scientists really do need to remember to cite the source of the ideas they are testing, not merely the latest attempt to validate those ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqDhT3OIEI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqDhT3OIEI8 https://archive.org/details/biologiclivingr00kellgoog https://archive.org/details/biologiclivingr00kellgoog http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cereal-mascots.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cere... Take something we already seem to want to believe, eg, "MSG is bad for you", and subject that sort of vague proposition to a battery of independent tests run by publication-biased or funding-biased researchers with a diversity of different levels of scientific rigor & statistical literacy, and you will always find some studies that pan out and prove the thing the scientists wanted to prove. Dietary research is extremely hard, because we can't keep humans caged in a controlled environment, and researchers rarely get a thousandth of the funding they would need to really legitimately demonstrate the principle they're poking at. The fact that there's no scientific basis for the observation, that the observation, if you chase it down, is a single anecdote of one guy eating salty food, that many other foods contain MSG, that the only reason it is being investigated is literally that it's the subject of rumors... these things have real weight on the chances that a study has produced a meaningful result and not merely some mistake or uncorrected correlation that the writers & peer review failed to catch. For things we already seem to want to believe whose only source of funding is a commercial entity... there is nearly zero epistemological significance to a study saying what they want it to say. Outside of the large group of things they might do to sway the results, they get to pick and choose which studies to publicize; A breakfast cereal company funding a study with perfect experimental design and perfectly honest researchers can merely publicize the one study out of twenty that reached statistical significance at p=0.05.
Vanit 10y ago
Time is an illusion. Breakfast time, doubly so.
darkstalker 10y ago
I don't eat breakfast since a long time. I wake up at 11am-12pm and sleep at 3-4am. I just sleep through it. Does that mean that my lunch counts as a breakfast?

176 points by hvo 10y ago

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.

zodPod 10y ago
No need to hate being that person! The bullshit paywalls are obnoxious! It's good to know I'm not the only one annoyed!
- sd8f9iu 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nkohari 10y ago
    Do you subscribe to all of the sites with paywalls?
    - EGreg 10y ago
      Why not make it simple? Maybe like a PayPal for Paywalls, to start a subscription with one click?
    - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
      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!"
Freak_NL 10y ago
Interesting. I am getting no nagging or blocking at all with uBlock Origin. No ads either.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
  Weird, I'm using uBlock Origin and am getting the "whitelist us or pay" message.
rconti 10y ago
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.

paulpauper 10y ago

tldr: methodological flaws and conflicts of interest undermine supposed superiority of breakfast

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mmastrac 10y ago

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.

IIlllIllIIIIlII 10y ago
.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 10y ago
  "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.
  - IIlllIllIIIIlII 10y ago
    "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 perceived_benefit(breakfast) > cost(breakfast) it could actually be that real_benefit(breakfast) < cost(breakfast)
    - 10y ago

gravypod 10y ago

Isn't the first meal that you eat in the day your "breakfast?" Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".

cmurf 10y ago
Yes from the "words have meaning" point of view, breakfast is unavoidable.
- hawleyal 10y ago
  There are other points of view?
  - fragsworth 10y ago
    That "words have other meanings", like breakfast would be what you eat within X hours of waking up.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    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.
  - jerf 10y ago
    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/understanding-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-grammar/ 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-guide-to-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.)

seanwilson 10y 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. I love this website for health science news and wish there were more like it: http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx 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%20the-most-important-meal-of-the-day.aspx 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.

maxerickson 10y ago
I'd say it is at least a ways into adolescence. Understanding vitamins and trace minerals was a pretty big step forward.
- ethbro 10y ago
  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.
- curun1r 10y ago
  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? [1] https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-food-part-2-nutritionalism/ https://metasteve.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/in-defense-of-foo...

pizza 10y ago

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 ;) Thoughts?

brahmwg 10y ago
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
clessg 10y ago
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.
magicbeanss 10y ago
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.

wmccullough 10y ago

Why does everything have to be so polarized anymore?

steego 10y ago
It sells more ads.
WalterSear 10y ago
It puts food on the table for journalists, gets politicians elected and is even career building for researchers. This is the attention economy: it's what you get when you combine news with capitalism.
tptacek 10y ago
"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.
- rco8786 10y ago
  I'm not sure that "evil" is the opposite of "magic"
  - usrusr 10y ago
    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.
pessimizer 10y ago
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.

steego 10y ago

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLudEZpMjKU

douche 10y ago
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.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  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.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Is there any scientific evidence that carbs are bad? It seems to be true on the internet, but I would prefer to see some proper peer reviewed studies.
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      Carbs aren't bad, they're just calorie-rich, hard on the pancreas and less satisfying than not-carbs, so you eat more of them.
      - collyw 10y ago
        They are as calorie rich as protein gram for gram, and less than half of fat. Have you any evidence for the other two claims?

malmsteen 10y ago

Pics of the author or GTFO. His body weight is probably the only thing that matters to that subject. Maybe he's overweight because of it.

StavrosK 10y ago

Also see this nice YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syleh_6Aopw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syleh_6Aopw

DominikR 10y ago

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)

Jtsummers 10y ago
> 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.
geoka9 10y ago
Fasting before working out may be good for cutting. But taking some BCAA or protein is recommended anyway. Bulking is unrealistic though.
antisthenes 10y ago
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.

fs111 10y ago

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: http://tim-spector.co.uk/ http://tim-spector.co.uk/

streblo 10y ago
FiveThirtyEight had an article about this recently: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you...

atonse 10y ago

I am just so unsettled by those broken yolks (I like my egg sunny side up), that I couldn't read the rest of the article.

mtw 10y ago

Eating requires a lot of energy. Eating too much in the evening will for example impact negatively your sleep. 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.

fu9ar 10y ago
[citation needed]
witty_username 10y ago
I sleep fine when I eat late, perhaps even better because my stomach is full and that feels good.

markbnj 10y ago

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.

jdmichal 10y ago
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.
fpoling 10y ago
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.
- markbnj 10y ago
  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.
jaggederest 10y ago
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.

askyourmother 10y ago

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!

internaut 10y ago
Waffles at the right time with coffee can be magical.

jcoffland 10y ago

"As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies." This is the real piece of truth in this article.

will_brown 10y ago

>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.

gutnor 10y ago
> This is fairly amusing. 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.
- will_brown 10y ago
  >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.

EGreg 10y ago

Here's what I think: 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.

UK-AL 10y ago

I'm a victim of this myth. I'm just not hungry in the morning. Some people love breakfast, and that's ok. 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.

Gonzih 10y ago

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.

detaro 10y ago
> So I'm not sure what author was trying to prove here. Natural schedule and physiology is different from person to person. 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.
bluthru 10y ago
That could also indicate that you are too dependent on carbs and therefore your brain has a difficult time on "fat burning mode".

Cozumel 10y ago

'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.' http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/ http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/

swanson 10y ago
Thanks! Was looking for a comment about this. So many of the long surviving 'myths' seem to be traceable back to an advertising campaign.

rabboRubble 10y ago

If I don't eat breakfast, I get a headache after I eat lunch. So for me breakfast is the equivalent of two Excedrin Migraine. Pure magic!

beamatronic 10y ago

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.

magicbeanss 10y ago
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.

emodendroket 10y ago

Well, magical or not, I do not want to be hungry until lunch.

dionidium 10y ago
The author doesn't get hungry before lunch. Maybe that seems weird to you, but it doesn't to me. I don't get hungry until lunch, either.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Not really weird, no. I felt that way when I was in high school. But now my habits have changed.

talles 10y ago

There's nothing magical about the way the author dismiss breakfast either. In the end it's an article where the author says that "breakfast research is flawed" and "I don't like breakfast". I'm disappointed on how the author missed intermittent fasting which, even not being scientific consensus, has many studies in favor of not breaking the fast.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rconti 10y ago

Heh. I'm a breakfast eater now. I used to not eat breakfast. I'd be starving at 11:45am when it was time to go out to lunch with my coworkers. I decided to make some changes in my diet so I wasn't so hungry for lunch and could make better choices. Started eating a healthy breakfast every morning. I was starving by 12:00pm. So, for my anecdatel point, I think it has more to do with when your body expects food than actual hunger.

mapt 10y ago

" This habit has forced me to be subjected to more lectures on how I’m hurting myself, my diet, my work and my health than almost any other. Only a fool would skip the most important meal of the day, right? As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies. " > Goes on to cite 2013 studies being wrong > Implies that "Our belief in the power of breakfast" dates to 2013 > Ignores the fact that our belief in the power of breakfast dates back to people like JR Kellog, 19th century food industrialist, 7th Day Adventist, and superintendant of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. One of the time's foremost authorities on health for the rich and famous, whom he lectured on the poison of meat & alcohol consumption and the ungodly plague of masturbation & orgasm, a guaranteed path to every disease known to man. He gave us calisthenics, grain-based breakfast, and also circumcision (though his clitorectomy and wire-based male chastity surgery did not catch on) based on his religious intuitions (stemming from the prophetic visions of Ellen G Wright) and social mores. Which were not, per se, peer reviewed to modern standards. They were marketed to consumers and the devout in an age of literal snake oil salesmen, in an era when doctors had a laughable corpus of knowledge. An impressive man, but scientists really do need to remember to cite the source of the ideas they are testing, not merely the latest attempt to validate those ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqDhT3OIEI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqDhT3OIEI8 https://archive.org/details/biologiclivingr00kellgoog https://archive.org/details/biologiclivingr00kellgoog http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cereal-mascots.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cere... Take something we already seem to want to believe, eg, "MSG is bad for you", and subject that sort of vague proposition to a battery of independent tests run by publication-biased or funding-biased researchers with a diversity of different levels of scientific rigor & statistical literacy, and you will always find some studies that pan out and prove the thing the scientists wanted to prove. Dietary research is extremely hard, because we can't keep humans caged in a controlled environment, and researchers rarely get a thousandth of the funding they would need to really legitimately demonstrate the principle they're poking at. The fact that there's no scientific basis for the observation, that the observation, if you chase it down, is a single anecdote of one guy eating salty food, that many other foods contain MSG, that the only reason it is being investigated is literally that it's the subject of rumors... these things have real weight on the chances that a study has produced a meaningful result and not merely some mistake or uncorrected correlation that the writers & peer review failed to catch. For things we already seem to want to believe whose only source of funding is a commercial entity... there is nearly zero epistemological significance to a study saying what they want it to say. Outside of the large group of things they might do to sway the results, they get to pick and choose which studies to publicize; A breakfast cereal company funding a study with perfect experimental design and perfectly honest researchers can merely publicize the one study out of twenty that reached statistical significance at p=0.05.

Vanit 10y ago

Time is an illusion. Breakfast time, doubly so.

darkstalker 10y ago

I don't eat breakfast since a long time. I wake up at 11am-12pm and sleep at 3-4am. I just sleep through it. Does that mean that my lunch counts as a breakfast?