9 ms·

Effect of Breakfast Skipping and Late Night Eating on BMI with Type 2 Diabetes

82 points by ianai 3y ago

fartsucker69 3y ago
bare bones correlation study
- aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
  In a 1.2 impact factor open access journal.
sheep-a 3y ago
This seems similar to intermittent fasting but with seemingly the opposite effect, I wonder what I'm missing.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Intermittent fasting is deliberate and actual fasting. Skipping breakfast often (but not consistently) probably lead to a greater feeling of hunger, and when combined with perhaps not being hungry in the morning because of the night eating mentioned it's no fasting either.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  This doesn't necessarily sound like intermittent fasting. "normal" eating means breakfast to dinner (let's say 8 PM). This is just shifted to let's say lunch to midnight (late night).
- jtlicardo 3y ago
  People who consciously do IF tend to eat healthier, while people who skip breakfast purely because they're lazy tend to eat less healthy food. I don't believe that eating time affects anything. Our caveman ancestors did not eat muesli immediately after waking up, and yet they did not have diabetes.
- runeks 3y ago
  You’re missing the fact that this study measures only correlation and nothing else, thus making it close to useless. The sample size is also tiny.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  your body handles glycemic load better earlier in the day. IF + front loading meals is a good recipe for improving metabolic health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7213043/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7213043/
- crdrost 3y ago
  Kind of, skipping breakfast definitely prolongs the usual nighttime fast whereas eating late definitely shortens it. So if you're doing both you're kind of not changing anything to first order. In terms of physical effects, someone who is doing intermittent fasting is attempting to deplete their body’s glycogen stores: your body very carefully regulates blood sugar (glucose) and stores a bunch of extra blood sugar in these hairballs called glycogen, stored mostly in the liver and in the muscle: then when your body needs more blood sugar circulating, it chops sugar bits off of the ends of the hairballs, or if it has too much sugar it grows the ends of the hairballs. The impact of fasting is a difference then between your activity and your intake, right? So if I want to really deplete my glycogen stores completely, I'll go run a marathon, that'll do it. Thinking really hard, like a game of chess, can too. Key to understanding the difference between fasting and late eating/breakfast skipping, is the fact that at night mostly we sleep or sit lazily in front of a TV or so. So by binging food late at night you are kind of doing the exact opposite of fasting, you are raising your blood sugar at the exact time that your body stops moving and your brain isn't thinking so much, so your body isn't processing that blood sugar. You fill up your glycogen stores this way! What happens when they get too full? Your body raises its blood concentration of a hormone (signaling molecule) called insulin. Muscle cells can take in blood sugar whenever they want, but fat storage cells have a “lock and key mechanism” where the channel to let in the blood sugar is controlled by this hormone, they cannot take it in without the insulin. So you get this insulin spike while you sleep, body is saying “I have too much glycogen, please store some blood sugar as fat so that I can shrink these glycogens into the bloodstream.” And you put on weight. But, by itself this is healthy weight. This is what's called subcutaneous fat, the fat that's living out by the skin, in adipose tissue. What will kill you is the visceral fat, which is a distortion of this process. To understand this, understand that a cell might not want to take on more blood sugar either. In programming terms, the bloodstream is a message bus, the insulin is a message on that bus, and the cell might want to NACK the message. A fat cell can only hold so much fat before it bursts, when it gets to bursting it needs to divide into two fat cells that are half full. So it needs to shut down, to say no no I am not taking the sugar in right now. The difference between programming and biology is that these are analog signals, so rather than a binary on/off, ack/nack, the cell reduces its sensitivity to insulin, “I just won't take on so much blood sugar right now.” Type 2 diabetes, what this study is talking about, is a disorder where you have a high blood sugar because your body is developing an insulin resistance. So if one cell down-regulates insulin, great, it is protecting itself. But if all your cells do this at the same time then the body can't clear the blood sugar. So what do you do? Analog system. You spike the insulin even higher. “But Mommy I don't want more”—“well TOO BAD finish your plate, we can't have this food going bad in the fridge and we don't want to attract bugs and DO AS I SAY!!”. As this starts to happen, you start getting fat deposits in places that are not off in secure storage out by the skin, but are sitting close to the organs where they can do real damage to the ongoing function of your cells—visceral fat. I hope that helps, the idea is that to first order there is no difference in the amount that you fast but only when you are fasting, and the serendipitous overlap of fasting with sleep and low activity is potentially disturbed by late eating and skipping breakfast, and that could be dangerous because if you are already in that hypernourished situation where you are putting on weight, then this puts potentially a larger strain on it during the night time, like it would be worse if you did late night snacking and also had breakfast, but the idea is that maybe even when you try to skip the breakfast to make up for it it isn't all a wash, it really matters when you eat maybe.
tedchs 3y ago
IMHO, anything to do with Body Mass Index (BMI) is fake science. Ironically, this writeup is also from nih.gov: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/
- arcosdev 3y ago
  Came here to say this. Bullshit study.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  BMI is often inadequate to evaluate an individual, but it has proven effective for measuring across larger sample size, since its coarseness will swing both ways and more or less cancel out.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    How do you measure effectiveness ? I am under the impression we have very few (any?) large scale intervention that have an objective positive effect, I'd be glad to know more.
  - beezle 3y ago
    Spot on. And let's be honest even at the individual level - you know whether your BMI is "high" because you are a muscular jock or just an average joe that (over)eats the wrong things and is a couch potato (same probably applies to the ultra-lean runner types on the low side).
- flavius29663 3y ago
  While for individual cases clinicians shouldn't rely on BMI much, and only use it for screening, in studies it makes sense to use it because it's a useful tool. A person with a BMI of 30 is almost always fatter than a person with a BMI of 20. The outliers (like athletes with big bones) wouldn't change the statistical analysis. It's in the same boat with IQ, it's a useful tool if you accept it has limited uses.
  - 3y ago
dcastm 3y ago
The title is wrong. There's no effect here, just correlation. It's pointless to draw any conclusions from this study. If you think otherwise, check https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
hikingsimulator 3y ago
Besides the mention of BMI by other users, I'd also ponder the study's applicability because of its focus on men and women in a city in Saudi Arabia, where cultural norms are likely at odds with more western sensibilities (e.g. access to sport amenities for women patients, etc.).
howeyc 3y ago
They interviewed 310 ppl, calculated their BMI, then found out around half skip breakfast. That half had BMI a little higher than the rest. No discussion of what they eat. What a waste of time for everyone involved.
- mechhacker 3y ago
  And BMI says nothing of body fat percentage Can have higher BMI and lower bodyfat I'm not convinced BMI is a useful metric
  - LordHeini 3y ago
    It is for studies because, the average person with a high BMI has higher body fat on average. That might not be the case individually but with multiple people the few outliers don't matter.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    yeah... but the likelihood that you have a high BMI because you're just so jacked is low. It's not perfect, but it's a good metric.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      It’s really not a good metric. It’s incredibly noisy. “Are you fat” isn’t something that needs a noisy metric. And it makes analyses messy when bmi is used as a measure of fatness.
      - wombat-man 3y ago
        Are you maybe hoping for a metric of general healthiness? Measuring body fat accurately on your own is tough. Most people know their height and can find a scale to use so you can get a rough idea of what bucket you're in. It's good for most people. If you're working out and pretty athletic idk why you'd stress about your bmi being a little high.
light_hue_1 3y ago
Readers and especially reviewers need to looking at effect sizes. Not just "was the p value under 0.05 so there is some effect". What a nothingburger. Let's break it down. > Breakfast skipping was correlated with BMI (Wald, 5.481, 95% CI, 0.154-0.847, P-value, 0.019). What that means is that breakfast skipping was correlated with somewhere between no BMI points and 1. We have no way of knowing which from this study. Basically, maybe your BMI goes up a little, but so little as to be irrelevant. > A positive direct correlation was evident between late dinner intake, BMI, and HbA1c (Wald, 4.210, 95% CI, 0.743-0.993, P-value, 0.04 for HbA1c, and Wald, 6.777, 95% CI, 1.0221-1.165, P-value, 0.009 for BMI). Maybe eating dinner late increases your BMI by 1 point or so. This is probably the same point they claim you gain from eating breakfast late. The A1c numbers are so close to being statistically insignificant that we can just ignore them. And that's before you add all of the other problems with the study. This study shows nothing. Yet another questionnaire based study about nutrition. I wish we could as a scientific community just ban this garbage.
johnfarrelldev 3y ago
This is self reported data which tends to be really bad data for obese patients. https://sci-hub.wf/10.1056/NEJM199305203282014 https://sci-hub.wf/10.1056/NEJM199305203282014
xnx 3y ago
Research like this is much less interesting considering the revolutionary impact GLP-1's are having on obesity related diseases, and now heart disease too: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/health/wegovy-obesity-drugs-heart-disease.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/health/wegovy-obesity-dru...
- twelve40 3y ago
  I'll wait until they start posting studies about what happens to people a few years after they stop taking this next revolution - do they bounce back more than control or less?
dhx 3y ago
No control group? No comparison across different demographic groups and countries? (for example, different food types being consumed at different times of the day) No definition of what time and energy intake constitutes "late eating"? (see [1] for an example study that did define "late eating") [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2006.17 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2006.17
- howeyc 3y ago
  They defined late as 2 hours before bed. No consistency of when bed is across the group. Breakfast was 5am to 10am. Looks like no control over food intake. For all we know, breakfast skippers might eat 2lbs of sugar for lunch in this study.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    My guess would be that it's people drinking diet soda, salad dressing, sugar+cream in their twenty coffees before lunch, and/or bread. It's entirely based on my experience with folks at the office. I, myself, don't eat breakfast for anxiety / gallbladder removal reasons (I also don't eat lunch when I'm not at/close to home for it), and my fat ass is from a horrid soda addiction as a kid.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Sugar and related carbs really is the worst, eat whole plate of baked potatoes and meat, sated for the rest of the day, eat the carb equivalent in pastries and brain is still in "want more" mode...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
rootusrootus 3y ago
It seems like there are a lot of breakfast skippers on HN that don’t like the correlation.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Worrisome to be sure. I knew skipping breakfast (and often dinner too) had little effect on weight, after years of that habit. What did work? Riding my bike on a week-long river-to-river 500 mile bike ride in Iowa this summer! That was a blast, I got stronger and I also lost a few pounds. Not for everybody I know.
  - gensym 3y ago
    I gained weight every RAGBRAI I did. Pie, beer, pork chops, walking tacos. Seems like I was eating or drinking beer every waking minute I wasn't on the bike. Worth it, though.
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      I rationalize, it's all muscle!
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      > RAGBRAI I had never heard of that before, but after looking it up I really wish I was close enough to participate. Sounds like a lot of fun.
taylodl 3y ago
All the people in the study already had type 2 diabetes. What would have been useful is to compare their breakfast skipping and late night eating habits (slightly more than half of the people in the study did these activities) against the habits of the general population? As it is, this study tells us nothing.
daneel_w 3y ago
Would be interesting to see another study with people who do both breakfast skipping and skipping late-night eating. When I was in my 30s I was a typical woefully sedentary "IT potato" with more than a few extra kilograms around the waist, but today in my early 40s I manage to stay slim and free from diabetes despite being just as sedentary, and I'm convinced that my intermittent fasting is contributing to it: These days I wait with breakfast until around lunchtime, and I have my last meal for the day between 6 and 8 o'clock in the evening. That is, instead of the usual pattern of eating during nearly two thirds of the day (16 hours) and fasting (sleeping) during one third (8 hours) I've turned it around so that I fast two thirds of the day, while still consuming the same amount of calories.
- endofreach 3y ago
  I was pretty sure this is the normal way of intermittent fasting. Otherwise most people i know would almost be doing intermittent fasting all the time. How did you eat before, if i may ask?
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    Same foods, same amounts, but the time span was more typical and covered about 14 hours starting with breakfast around 9 in the morning and ending with a small snack around 11 in the evening (though never close to bedtime). What I do now is to simply compress the same consumption (including the small snack after dinner) so that it fits in a span of 7 hours on average. I'm flexible with it since some days and schedules call for other plans. My goal is not complicated: eat nothing for an unbroken stretch of roughly 16 hours per day.
- stevezsa8 3y ago
  For me, I was in good shape in my 30s. Then the weight started to creep on. Now I've been having my first meal after lunch, exercising more by walking and snacking less. Too early to tell how it goes long term. I'm trying to be a little flexible. So if it's 9am and I'm hungry, or I know I'm heading out the house for a busy morning, I'll eat fruit or vegetables. But no bread.
- 3y ago
paulpauper 3y ago
lol when I was at my heaviest, I often skipped breakfast. I must have been an IF champ...people online would have been envious of my routine. i could have sold a diet book about it. as it turned out, this could be explained simply by the fact i had eaten so much for dinner and before bed that i was full in the morning from still digesting the food. meh.
aa_is_op 3y ago
I can personally vouch for this study
Kiro 3y ago
Imagine if the study said the opposite. HN would praise it and the thread would be filled with positive anecdotes. No questions asked. But now when it goes against the popular narrative everyone does everything to discredit it. Classic HN behavior.
- PointyFluff 3y ago
  [dead]
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Please don't put words in other people's mouths. It lowers the level of conversation, and adds nothing new.
kbutler 3y ago
Correlation vs causation is particularly problematic in studies where people may be trying to change the result under study "I skip breakfast, so I am overweight." or "I am overweight, so I skip breakfast."
brmgb 3y ago
I will bet on the usual confounding variables when it comes to lifestyle study. Highly likely that eating late at night means coming home late, probably due to working late which probably means a more stressful life. Sadly they are controlling for a chokingly low amount of variables so we will never know.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Where did the apparent baseline hypothesis that breakfast skipping was bad originate from? They even use it as a keyword. Why is breakfast so holy?
- retzkek 3y ago
  As usual, it's from people pushing their beliefs and/or their products on the public to serve their own purposes; further, as with so many modern ills, we can put some of the blame on Edward Bernays. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfast-health-america-kellog-food-lifestyle https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfa...
wiradikusuma 3y ago
Damn. I thought skipping breakfast is good for adults (I'm 40). Anyway, let's say late night eating is bad. But many programmers I know (including myself) are more productive at night. But working = hungry. How do you handle this contradiction?
- twelve40 3y ago
  by meditating a lot and staying away from blue light. Jk: you don't, if you're an owl (like me too), you're screwed.
aantix 3y ago
I feel like we're in the dark ages with nutritional testing. Someday this will be cross referenced with genetics. E.g. If you read about coffee, most report that it's a net positive. Drink more coffee. But if you're a slow metabolizer like myself, the caffeine stays in your system 4X the normal person and actually significantly increases your chance for a cardiac event. So if you just read the pop-sci articles, kept drinking coffee, but you're the 1/3 of the population that's a slow metabolizer, you've been doing yourself a disservice your entire life. Worse sleep. More anxiety. https://www.mygenefood.com/blog/why-coffee-is-bad-for-me-but-might-be-good-for-you/ https://www.mygenefood.com/blog/why-coffee-is-bad-for-me-but...
whycome 3y ago
"breakfast skipping" -- implies that it's some sort of requirement.
fwungy 3y ago
I can see from my Oura ring data that late night eating is hard on the body and the harm is correlated with the how heavy the meal was. The issue is that it takes work to digest food. Your body does not get to rest as well when you eat late at night. You see it in your heart rate / hrv. Small amounts of carbs don't seem to matter much. A big protein meal is the worst.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Also for weight loss the best time to be hungry is when you're unconscious so timing the meals when the "I'm hungry" time is during sleep helps a lot
- twelve40 3y ago
  yeah but going to sleep hungry, for me at least, is the absolute worst feeling. For me it's not just a matter of heart rate, if i'm hungry there is a good chance I will get no sleep at all. So if i end up for whatever reason not eating ahead of time.... kind of screwed...
make3 3y ago
is this "before and after" ? otherwise I can see heavier ppl skipping breakfast to try to lose weight, which inverts the causality
postmodest 3y ago
I would love to see a study where they compare the skip-breakfast/eat-late behavior to circadian rhythm and then normalize for that to see if people who work to their actual circadian rhythm are less likely to be diabetic than the 8-5 crowd. Because I know that left to my own devices, I wake at 10am, eat at noon, and go to sleep at 1am, but "real life" means I wake up 4 hours "off schedule" so my diet clock doesn't match my sleep schedule.
barbazoo 3y ago
> Breakfast skipping and late dinner intake were associated with obesity, while only late dinner consumption was associated with poor glycemic control. So they measured that if one doesn't eat breakfast they were more likely to be obese than people that did eat breakfast?
vlark 3y ago
I question the population focus and it's applicability to Western, specifically American, diets. The study focused on 310 diabetic patients in Saudi Arabia. I don't think it is going out on a limb to say that there are dietary differences between the typical Saudi Arabian diet and the typical American diet, especially in the overwhelming reliance on ultra-processed, pre-packaged foods in the U.S. Perhaps this might have more applicability to diabetic patients in Europe, specifically those who follow the Mediterranean diet due to socio-geographic reasons.

82 points by ianai 3y ago

fartsucker69 3y ago

bare bones correlation study

aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
In a 1.2 impact factor open access journal.

sheep-a 3y ago

This seems similar to intermittent fasting but with seemingly the opposite effect, I wonder what I'm missing.

matsemann 3y ago
Intermittent fasting is deliberate and actual fasting. Skipping breakfast often (but not consistently) probably lead to a greater feeling of hunger, and when combined with perhaps not being hungry in the morning because of the night eating mentioned it's no fasting either.
The_Colonel 3y ago
This doesn't necessarily sound like intermittent fasting. "normal" eating means breakfast to dinner (let's say 8 PM). This is just shifted to let's say lunch to midnight (late night).
jtlicardo 3y ago
People who consciously do IF tend to eat healthier, while people who skip breakfast purely because they're lazy tend to eat less healthy food. I don't believe that eating time affects anything. Our caveman ancestors did not eat muesli immediately after waking up, and yet they did not have diabetes.
runeks 3y ago
You’re missing the fact that this study measures only correlation and nothing else, thus making it close to useless. The sample size is also tiny.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
your body handles glycemic load better earlier in the day. IF + front loading meals is a good recipe for improving metabolic health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7213043/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7213043/
crdrost 3y ago
Kind of, skipping breakfast definitely prolongs the usual nighttime fast whereas eating late definitely shortens it. So if you're doing both you're kind of not changing anything to first order. In terms of physical effects, someone who is doing intermittent fasting is attempting to deplete their body’s glycogen stores: your body very carefully regulates blood sugar (glucose) and stores a bunch of extra blood sugar in these hairballs called glycogen, stored mostly in the liver and in the muscle: then when your body needs more blood sugar circulating, it chops sugar bits off of the ends of the hairballs, or if it has too much sugar it grows the ends of the hairballs. The impact of fasting is a difference then between your activity and your intake, right? So if I want to really deplete my glycogen stores completely, I'll go run a marathon, that'll do it. Thinking really hard, like a game of chess, can too. Key to understanding the difference between fasting and late eating/breakfast skipping, is the fact that at night mostly we sleep or sit lazily in front of a TV or so. So by binging food late at night you are kind of doing the exact opposite of fasting, you are raising your blood sugar at the exact time that your body stops moving and your brain isn't thinking so much, so your body isn't processing that blood sugar. You fill up your glycogen stores this way! What happens when they get too full? Your body raises its blood concentration of a hormone (signaling molecule) called insulin. Muscle cells can take in blood sugar whenever they want, but fat storage cells have a “lock and key mechanism” where the channel to let in the blood sugar is controlled by this hormone, they cannot take it in without the insulin. So you get this insulin spike while you sleep, body is saying “I have too much glycogen, please store some blood sugar as fat so that I can shrink these glycogens into the bloodstream.” And you put on weight. But, by itself this is healthy weight. This is what's called subcutaneous fat, the fat that's living out by the skin, in adipose tissue. What will kill you is the visceral fat, which is a distortion of this process. To understand this, understand that a cell might not want to take on more blood sugar either. In programming terms, the bloodstream is a message bus, the insulin is a message on that bus, and the cell might want to NACK the message. A fat cell can only hold so much fat before it bursts, when it gets to bursting it needs to divide into two fat cells that are half full. So it needs to shut down, to say no no I am not taking the sugar in right now. The difference between programming and biology is that these are analog signals, so rather than a binary on/off, ack/nack, the cell reduces its sensitivity to insulin, “I just won't take on so much blood sugar right now.” Type 2 diabetes, what this study is talking about, is a disorder where you have a high blood sugar because your body is developing an insulin resistance. So if one cell down-regulates insulin, great, it is protecting itself. But if all your cells do this at the same time then the body can't clear the blood sugar. So what do you do? Analog system. You spike the insulin even higher. “But Mommy I don't want more”—“well TOO BAD finish your plate, we can't have this food going bad in the fridge and we don't want to attract bugs and DO AS I SAY!!”. As this starts to happen, you start getting fat deposits in places that are not off in secure storage out by the skin, but are sitting close to the organs where they can do real damage to the ongoing function of your cells—visceral fat. I hope that helps, the idea is that to first order there is no difference in the amount that you fast but only when you are fasting, and the serendipitous overlap of fasting with sleep and low activity is potentially disturbed by late eating and skipping breakfast, and that could be dangerous because if you are already in that hypernourished situation where you are putting on weight, then this puts potentially a larger strain on it during the night time, like it would be worse if you did late night snacking and also had breakfast, but the idea is that maybe even when you try to skip the breakfast to make up for it it isn't all a wash, it really matters when you eat maybe.

tedchs 3y ago

IMHO, anything to do with Body Mass Index (BMI) is fake science. Ironically, this writeup is also from nih.gov: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/

arcosdev 3y ago
Came here to say this. Bullshit study.
The_Colonel 3y ago
BMI is often inadequate to evaluate an individual, but it has proven effective for measuring across larger sample size, since its coarseness will swing both ways and more or less cancel out.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  How do you measure effectiveness ? I am under the impression we have very few (any?) large scale intervention that have an objective positive effect, I'd be glad to know more.
- beezle 3y ago
  Spot on. And let's be honest even at the individual level - you know whether your BMI is "high" because you are a muscular jock or just an average joe that (over)eats the wrong things and is a couch potato (same probably applies to the ultra-lean runner types on the low side).
flavius29663 3y ago
While for individual cases clinicians shouldn't rely on BMI much, and only use it for screening, in studies it makes sense to use it because it's a useful tool. A person with a BMI of 30 is almost always fatter than a person with a BMI of 20. The outliers (like athletes with big bones) wouldn't change the statistical analysis. It's in the same boat with IQ, it's a useful tool if you accept it has limited uses.
- 3y ago

dcastm 3y ago

The title is wrong. There's no effect here, just correlation. It's pointless to draw any conclusions from this study. If you think otherwise, check https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

hikingsimulator 3y ago

Besides the mention of BMI by other users, I'd also ponder the study's applicability because of its focus on men and women in a city in Saudi Arabia, where cultural norms are likely at odds with more western sensibilities (e.g. access to sport amenities for women patients, etc.).

howeyc 3y ago

They interviewed 310 ppl, calculated their BMI, then found out around half skip breakfast. That half had BMI a little higher than the rest. No discussion of what they eat. What a waste of time for everyone involved.

mechhacker 3y ago
And BMI says nothing of body fat percentage Can have higher BMI and lower bodyfat I'm not convinced BMI is a useful metric
- LordHeini 3y ago
  It is for studies because, the average person with a high BMI has higher body fat on average. That might not be the case individually but with multiple people the few outliers don't matter.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  yeah... but the likelihood that you have a high BMI because you're just so jacked is low. It's not perfect, but it's a good metric.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    It’s really not a good metric. It’s incredibly noisy. “Are you fat” isn’t something that needs a noisy metric. And it makes analyses messy when bmi is used as a measure of fatness.
    - wombat-man 3y ago
      Are you maybe hoping for a metric of general healthiness? Measuring body fat accurately on your own is tough. Most people know their height and can find a scale to use so you can get a rough idea of what bucket you're in. It's good for most people. If you're working out and pretty athletic idk why you'd stress about your bmi being a little high.

light_hue_1 3y ago

Readers and especially reviewers need to looking at effect sizes. Not just "was the p value under 0.05 so there is some effect". What a nothingburger. Let's break it down. > Breakfast skipping was correlated with BMI (Wald, 5.481, 95% CI, 0.154-0.847, P-value, 0.019). What that means is that breakfast skipping was correlated with somewhere between no BMI points and 1. We have no way of knowing which from this study. Basically, maybe your BMI goes up a little, but so little as to be irrelevant. > A positive direct correlation was evident between late dinner intake, BMI, and HbA1c (Wald, 4.210, 95% CI, 0.743-0.993, P-value, 0.04 for HbA1c, and Wald, 6.777, 95% CI, 1.0221-1.165, P-value, 0.009 for BMI). Maybe eating dinner late increases your BMI by 1 point or so. This is probably the same point they claim you gain from eating breakfast late. The A1c numbers are so close to being statistically insignificant that we can just ignore them. And that's before you add all of the other problems with the study. This study shows nothing. Yet another questionnaire based study about nutrition. I wish we could as a scientific community just ban this garbage.

johnfarrelldev 3y ago

This is self reported data which tends to be really bad data for obese patients. https://sci-hub.wf/10.1056/NEJM199305203282014 https://sci-hub.wf/10.1056/NEJM199305203282014

xnx 3y ago

Research like this is much less interesting considering the revolutionary impact GLP-1's are having on obesity related diseases, and now heart disease too: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/health/wegovy-obesity-drugs-heart-disease.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/health/wegovy-obesity-dru...

twelve40 3y ago
I'll wait until they start posting studies about what happens to people a few years after they stop taking this next revolution - do they bounce back more than control or less?

dhx 3y ago

No control group? No comparison across different demographic groups and countries? (for example, different food types being consumed at different times of the day) No definition of what time and energy intake constitutes "late eating"? (see [1] for an example study that did define "late eating") [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2006.17 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2006.17

howeyc 3y ago
They defined late as 2 hours before bed. No consistency of when bed is across the group. Breakfast was 5am to 10am. Looks like no control over food intake. For all we know, breakfast skippers might eat 2lbs of sugar for lunch in this study.
- deprecative 3y ago
  My guess would be that it's people drinking diet soda, salad dressing, sugar+cream in their twenty coffees before lunch, and/or bread. It's entirely based on my experience with folks at the office. I, myself, don't eat breakfast for anxiety / gallbladder removal reasons (I also don't eat lunch when I'm not at/close to home for it), and my fat ass is from a horrid soda addiction as a kid.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Sugar and related carbs really is the worst, eat whole plate of baked potatoes and meat, sated for the rest of the day, eat the carb equivalent in pastries and brain is still in "want more" mode...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

rootusrootus 3y ago

It seems like there are a lot of breakfast skippers on HN that don’t like the correlation.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Worrisome to be sure. I knew skipping breakfast (and often dinner too) had little effect on weight, after years of that habit. What did work? Riding my bike on a week-long river-to-river 500 mile bike ride in Iowa this summer! That was a blast, I got stronger and I also lost a few pounds. Not for everybody I know.
- gensym 3y ago
  I gained weight every RAGBRAI I did. Pie, beer, pork chops, walking tacos. Seems like I was eating or drinking beer every waking minute I wasn't on the bike. Worth it, though.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    I rationalize, it's all muscle!
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > RAGBRAI I had never heard of that before, but after looking it up I really wish I was close enough to participate. Sounds like a lot of fun.

taylodl 3y ago

All the people in the study already had type 2 diabetes. What would have been useful is to compare their breakfast skipping and late night eating habits (slightly more than half of the people in the study did these activities) against the habits of the general population? As it is, this study tells us nothing.

daneel_w 3y ago

Would be interesting to see another study with people who do both breakfast skipping and skipping late-night eating. When I was in my 30s I was a typical woefully sedentary "IT potato" with more than a few extra kilograms around the waist, but today in my early 40s I manage to stay slim and free from diabetes despite being just as sedentary, and I'm convinced that my intermittent fasting is contributing to it: These days I wait with breakfast until around lunchtime, and I have my last meal for the day between 6 and 8 o'clock in the evening. That is, instead of the usual pattern of eating during nearly two thirds of the day (16 hours) and fasting (sleeping) during one third (8 hours) I've turned it around so that I fast two thirds of the day, while still consuming the same amount of calories.

endofreach 3y ago
I was pretty sure this is the normal way of intermittent fasting. Otherwise most people i know would almost be doing intermittent fasting all the time. How did you eat before, if i may ask?
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Same foods, same amounts, but the time span was more typical and covered about 14 hours starting with breakfast around 9 in the morning and ending with a small snack around 11 in the evening (though never close to bedtime). What I do now is to simply compress the same consumption (including the small snack after dinner) so that it fits in a span of 7 hours on average. I'm flexible with it since some days and schedules call for other plans. My goal is not complicated: eat nothing for an unbroken stretch of roughly 16 hours per day.
stevezsa8 3y ago
For me, I was in good shape in my 30s. Then the weight started to creep on. Now I've been having my first meal after lunch, exercising more by walking and snacking less. Too early to tell how it goes long term. I'm trying to be a little flexible. So if it's 9am and I'm hungry, or I know I'm heading out the house for a busy morning, I'll eat fruit or vegetables. But no bread.
3y ago

paulpauper 3y ago

lol when I was at my heaviest, I often skipped breakfast. I must have been an IF champ...people online would have been envious of my routine. i could have sold a diet book about it. as it turned out, this could be explained simply by the fact i had eaten so much for dinner and before bed that i was full in the morning from still digesting the food. meh.

aa_is_op 3y ago

I can personally vouch for this study

Kiro 3y ago

Imagine if the study said the opposite. HN would praise it and the thread would be filled with positive anecdotes. No questions asked. But now when it goes against the popular narrative everyone does everything to discredit it. Classic HN behavior.

PointyFluff 3y ago
[dead]
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Please don't put words in other people's mouths. It lowers the level of conversation, and adds nothing new.

kbutler 3y ago

Correlation vs causation is particularly problematic in studies where people may be trying to change the result under study "I skip breakfast, so I am overweight." or "I am overweight, so I skip breakfast."

brmgb 3y ago

I will bet on the usual confounding variables when it comes to lifestyle study. Highly likely that eating late at night means coming home late, probably due to working late which probably means a more stressful life. Sadly they are controlling for a chokingly low amount of variables so we will never know.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Where did the apparent baseline hypothesis that breakfast skipping was bad originate from? They even use it as a keyword. Why is breakfast so holy?

retzkek 3y ago
As usual, it's from people pushing their beliefs and/or their products on the public to serve their own purposes; further, as with so many modern ills, we can put some of the blame on Edward Bernays. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfast-health-america-kellog-food-lifestyle https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/28/breakfa...

wiradikusuma 3y ago

Damn. I thought skipping breakfast is good for adults (I'm 40). Anyway, let's say late night eating is bad. But many programmers I know (including myself) are more productive at night. But working = hungry. How do you handle this contradiction?

twelve40 3y ago
by meditating a lot and staying away from blue light. Jk: you don't, if you're an owl (like me too), you're screwed.

aantix 3y ago

I feel like we're in the dark ages with nutritional testing. Someday this will be cross referenced with genetics. E.g. If you read about coffee, most report that it's a net positive. Drink more coffee. But if you're a slow metabolizer like myself, the caffeine stays in your system 4X the normal person and actually significantly increases your chance for a cardiac event. So if you just read the pop-sci articles, kept drinking coffee, but you're the 1/3 of the population that's a slow metabolizer, you've been doing yourself a disservice your entire life. Worse sleep. More anxiety. https://www.mygenefood.com/blog/why-coffee-is-bad-for-me-but-might-be-good-for-you/ https://www.mygenefood.com/blog/why-coffee-is-bad-for-me-but...

whycome 3y ago

"breakfast skipping" -- implies that it's some sort of requirement.

fwungy 3y ago

I can see from my Oura ring data that late night eating is hard on the body and the harm is correlated with the how heavy the meal was. The issue is that it takes work to digest food. Your body does not get to rest as well when you eat late at night. You see it in your heart rate / hrv. Small amounts of carbs don't seem to matter much. A big protein meal is the worst.

ilyt 3y ago
Also for weight loss the best time to be hungry is when you're unconscious so timing the meals when the "I'm hungry" time is during sleep helps a lot
twelve40 3y ago
yeah but going to sleep hungry, for me at least, is the absolute worst feeling. For me it's not just a matter of heart rate, if i'm hungry there is a good chance I will get no sleep at all. So if i end up for whatever reason not eating ahead of time.... kind of screwed...

make3 3y ago

is this "before and after" ? otherwise I can see heavier ppl skipping breakfast to try to lose weight, which inverts the causality

postmodest 3y ago

I would love to see a study where they compare the skip-breakfast/eat-late behavior to circadian rhythm and then normalize for that to see if people who work to their actual circadian rhythm are less likely to be diabetic than the 8-5 crowd. Because I know that left to my own devices, I wake at 10am, eat at noon, and go to sleep at 1am, but "real life" means I wake up 4 hours "off schedule" so my diet clock doesn't match my sleep schedule.

barbazoo 3y ago

> Breakfast skipping and late dinner intake were associated with obesity, while only late dinner consumption was associated with poor glycemic control. So they measured that if one doesn't eat breakfast they were more likely to be obese than people that did eat breakfast?

vlark 3y ago

I question the population focus and it's applicability to Western, specifically American, diets. The study focused on 310 diabetic patients in Saudi Arabia. I don't think it is going out on a limb to say that there are dietary differences between the typical Saudi Arabian diet and the typical American diet, especially in the overwhelming reliance on ultra-processed, pre-packaged foods in the U.S. Perhaps this might have more applicability to diabetic patients in Europe, specifically those who follow the Mediterranean diet due to socio-geographic reasons.