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[quote]I've seen more and more research on the benefits of fasting and skipping breakfast[/quote] Interestingly, even research into eating habits (or at least

by w0utert 14y ago

[quote]I've seen more and more research on the benefits of fasting and skipping breakfast[/quote] Interestingly, even research into eating habits (or at least the way the media picks up and reports on it) appears to be culturally biased, because where I live (Western Europe), there's an almost unrelenting stream of experts telling me how bad skipping breakfeast is. Supposedly it will make you fat, tired, weak and eventually even sick. It's pretty annoying. I haven't been eating breakfast for almost 20 years without any perceived negative health effects, but every time I tell someone about it I get this lecture about how bad it is to not eat breakfast. This point of view is purely based on conjecture repeated from something people have heard before, never out of personal experience. When it comes to food & health, people really are like sheep, nobody really knows anything about it, but everyone has on opinion, and almost all these opinions are the same, based on 'common sense' and lore, not on scientific facts. Only 10 years ago common sense said 5 glasses of milk a day were healthy, or bread and cheese for lunch. 1/5th of your diet should consist of dairy products. Today everybody thinks differently. Now counting calories is all the hype, but slowly research is starting to tell us that not all calories are the same in the sense that the kinds of food that contain them are digested differently. tl;dr: I always get a little frustrated when people start telling me what is or isn't 'healthy' because most people are basically mindlessly repeating what someone else told them. Eating breakfast 'because it's healthy' is one of these things.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
> not on scientific facts But yes - all these guesses are the scientific facts as far as we know them. You can complain about nutritional science being absolutely immature and probably highly corrupt, but it's still the best we have, and people who follow it aren't sheep anymore than I am for believing that there are atoms just because I was told so.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  Except when 'scientific research' is largely based on what an industry (e.g. dairy products) wants to sell you.
- graeme 14y ago
  If a science is corrupt, it can be worse than useless. Scientific 'authority' is potentially as dangerous as other types of authority, if it isn't based on the scientific method. Many authors (Nassim Taleb, Michael Pollan) talk about using other measures as heuristics. Pollan says 'would your great-grandmother have recognized it as food?'. Adopting that one rule beats most modern nutrition advice. We don't have evidence physics is corrupt. That's why your belief about atoms is reasonable.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    What evidence do you have that nutrition science is corrupt and not based on the scientific method?
    - w0utert 14y ago
      >> What evidence do you have that nutrition science is corrupt and not based on the scientific method? The fact that conclusions resulting from 'nutrition science' often seem to contradict, or are found to be completely wrong every few years should be an indication. Today drinking coffee is bad, tomorrow it reduces your risk of getting cancer. Yesterday nuts were bad and will make you fat, today thay aren't that bad after all because the calories they contain mostly leave your body undigested. At one point in time eating eggs more than twice a week was considered bad for you because of the cholesterol they contain, but according to the latest studies they are a 'superfood', and the cholesterol they contain appears to have no relation to blood cholesterol. The problem with 'nutrition science' (I have to put it between quotes it because I consider it more like religion than science) is that health effects resulting from diet almost exclusively manifest themselves after many many years. This makes it very hard to reliably measure them, not only because it involves tracking large groups of people over a long period of time, who need to stay on a consistent diet, should not move around to much because otherwise other factors around them could affect their health etc. Research into nutrition health benefits suffers from the same limitations many other epidemiology research suffers. As it turns out, health is correlated to so many other things it is almost impossible to reliably relate health effects to causes. The difference between epidemiologists and 'nutrition scientists' is that the former group directly acknowledges the limitations of their population studies, while 'facts' about nutrition are usually presented as truth, and nobody seems to care to challenge them.
- dharmach 14y ago
  And many of those scientific facts are facts for only limited group of people, based on combination of various genetic, age/lifestyle related and environmental factors.
conradfr 14y ago
There are been studies showing that children eating breakfast had better grades than those who don't.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Firstly, citation required. We need to know how rigorous the study was and whether or not it controlled for other factors such as SES. Given breakfast's popularity in our society, one would expect that many people who don't have breakfast can't have breakfast - and this is highly correlated with socioeconomic status and poverty, and we've known for a long time that SES is a greater determinant of academic performance than just about any other factor. In other words, are you sure your study isn't just talking about poor kids not having breakfast, or is it properly controlling for variables?
upthedale 14y ago
My favourite article for laying out some scientific reasoning behind skipping breakfast is the following: http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-part-2-breakfast/ http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-...
atomical 14y ago
There's a new movement on the horizon called "I'm not hungry." Why don't you have breakfast? I'm not hungry. Why don't you have lunch? I'm still not hungry. Hunger shouldn't always drive the need to eat.

by w0utert 14y ago

gurkendoktor 14y ago

> not on scientific facts But yes - all these guesses are the scientific facts as far as we know them. You can complain about nutritional science being absolutely immature and probably highly corrupt, but it's still the best we have, and people who follow it aren't sheep anymore than I am for believing that there are atoms just because I was told so.

goldfeld 14y ago
Except when 'scientific research' is largely based on what an industry (e.g. dairy products) wants to sell you.
graeme 14y ago
If a science is corrupt, it can be worse than useless. Scientific 'authority' is potentially as dangerous as other types of authority, if it isn't based on the scientific method. Many authors (Nassim Taleb, Michael Pollan) talk about using other measures as heuristics. Pollan says 'would your great-grandmother have recognized it as food?'. Adopting that one rule beats most modern nutrition advice. We don't have evidence physics is corrupt. That's why your belief about atoms is reasonable.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  What evidence do you have that nutrition science is corrupt and not based on the scientific method?
  - w0utert 14y ago
    >> What evidence do you have that nutrition science is corrupt and not based on the scientific method? The fact that conclusions resulting from 'nutrition science' often seem to contradict, or are found to be completely wrong every few years should be an indication. Today drinking coffee is bad, tomorrow it reduces your risk of getting cancer. Yesterday nuts were bad and will make you fat, today thay aren't that bad after all because the calories they contain mostly leave your body undigested. At one point in time eating eggs more than twice a week was considered bad for you because of the cholesterol they contain, but according to the latest studies they are a 'superfood', and the cholesterol they contain appears to have no relation to blood cholesterol. The problem with 'nutrition science' (I have to put it between quotes it because I consider it more like religion than science) is that health effects resulting from diet almost exclusively manifest themselves after many many years. This makes it very hard to reliably measure them, not only because it involves tracking large groups of people over a long period of time, who need to stay on a consistent diet, should not move around to much because otherwise other factors around them could affect their health etc. Research into nutrition health benefits suffers from the same limitations many other epidemiology research suffers. As it turns out, health is correlated to so many other things it is almost impossible to reliably relate health effects to causes. The difference between epidemiologists and 'nutrition scientists' is that the former group directly acknowledges the limitations of their population studies, while 'facts' about nutrition are usually presented as truth, and nobody seems to care to challenge them.
dharmach 14y ago
And many of those scientific facts are facts for only limited group of people, based on combination of various genetic, age/lifestyle related and environmental factors.

conradfr 14y ago

There are been studies showing that children eating breakfast had better grades than those who don't.

potatolicious 14y ago
Firstly, citation required. We need to know how rigorous the study was and whether or not it controlled for other factors such as SES. Given breakfast's popularity in our society, one would expect that many people who don't have breakfast can't have breakfast - and this is highly correlated with socioeconomic status and poverty, and we've known for a long time that SES is a greater determinant of academic performance than just about any other factor. In other words, are you sure your study isn't just talking about poor kids not having breakfast, or is it properly controlling for variables?

upthedale 14y ago

My favourite article for laying out some scientific reasoning behind skipping breakfast is the following: http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-part-2-breakfast/ http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-...

atomical 14y ago

There's a new movement on the horizon called "I'm not hungry." Why don't you have breakfast? I'm not hungry. Why don't you have lunch? I'm still not hungry. Hunger shouldn't always drive the need to eat.