Is it okay to skip the ‘most important meal of the day’?

For more than 100 years, health advocates have called breakfast “the most important meal of the day.” Many have also recommended that breakfast be the largest meal of the day, citing the old adage: Eat breakfast like a king, eat lunch like a prince, and eat dinner like a pauper. But new research in The BMJ indicates that eating breakfast may not be so essential after all, and that skipping it may be just fine for watching your weight.

“Many observational studies have suggested that regular breakfast consumption is associated with low body mass index and is a protective factor against weight gain,” wrote researchers co-led by Katherine Sievert, MPH, and Flavia Cicuttini, PhD, MSc, professor, Clinical Epidemiology, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

However, they add, “consumption of breakfast might not be a good strategy for weight loss, regardless of established breakfast habit. Caution is needed when recommending breakfast for weight loss in adults, as it could have the opposite effect.”

Just another diet myth?

“We are told that breakfast helps our metabolism and that skipping it will make us much hungrier so we’ll overeat and put on weight,” wrote Tim Spector, MD, MSc, professor, Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College, London, UK, in a related BMJ blog post. “These are not just old wives’ tales…These are mirrored in many other national guidelines, as well as the lay press and websites across the world. But what if this is just another diet myth?”

To find out, the research team at Monash University performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, mostly from the US and the UK, from the past 28 years. Of the 13 trials included, 7 investigated the effect of breakfast on changes in body weight and 10 examined the effect of breakfast on daily energy intake.

The researchers found that participants who ate breakfast had greater total daily caloric intake than those who skipped it (an average of 260 more calories consumed in a day). Furthermore, participants who skipped breakfast weighed a little less, on average 0.44 kg (about 1 lb), regardless of whether they were normal weight or overweight.

Skip breakfast, lose weight

A long-held belief about skipping breakfast is that it leads to overeating later in the day, and therefore eating breakfast helps with weight loss by metabolizing calories more efficiently and evenly throughout the day. But the researchers found no significant difference in metabolic rates between breakfast eaters and breakfast skippers.

Another belief is that those who eat breakfast have more energy, so they’re more active and they burn more calories than those who don’t eat breakfast. But the researchers found that this isn’t necessarily so. Two studies demonstrated that breakfast eaters did increase physical activity, particularly in the morning, but three studies showed no difference in activity levels between breakfast eaters and skippers.

Similarly, skipping breakfast was not linked to increased hunger in the afternoon.

“Taken together, the data do not support the assumption that omitting breakfast might lead to overconsumption of calories later in the day,” the authors concluded. “Instead, they suggest that skipping breakfast might be an effective means to reduce total daily energy intake.”

No ‘one size fits all’

The researchers acknowledged that the quality of the studies included in the meta-analysis was low, so the findings should be interpreted with caution. However, they pointed out that “currently, the available evidence does not support modifying diets in adults to include the consumption of breakfast as a good strategy to lose weight.”

There’s no “one size fits all” for eating breakfast, according to Dr. Spector. And “guidelines filled with erroneous information look increasingly counterproductive and detract from important health messages. While waiting for guidelines to change, no harm can be done in trying out your own personal experiments in skipping breakfast,” he concluded.