Is Breakfast Really Bad For You?

In recent years we have seen a surge in the popularity of intermittent fasting. I’ve heard testimonials from countless people saying that it helped them lose tons of weight and control their eating. Intermittent fasting is a great tool for setting guidelines around when you can eat which will generally lead to more mindful eating, and subsequently consuming fewer calories. To this day it has not been proven that there is a benefit to intermittent fasting over normal caloric restriction, and fasting is not necessary for weight loss as some people may promote. However, with the popularization of fasting has also come the demonisation of breakfast. I have seen people all over the internet saying you shouldn’t eat breakfast for various reasons. A few of them include:

-Spiking your insulin in the morning will tank your blood sugar and ruin your energy.

-Growth hormone stays elevated longer in the morning if you do not eat.

-Cortisol and epinephrine are elevated in the morning which release sugar into the blood and you should just use this for energy.

-If you spike your insulin you cannot access fat stores to burn them off and lose weight.

To the uninformed all of these reasons appear valid, and I have seen some pretty convincing “doctors” on the internet making careers off of telling people to skip breakfast. However, I’m here to tell you that you CAN still eat breakfast and lose weight and the world will not end if you eat before noon.

All of the reasons to not eat breakfast that I have seen people throw around make sense in theory, however, they are all mechanistic. This means the theories are based on isolated biological mechanisms that are valid, however they fail to take into account the rest of the human body, which is amazingly complex. When looking at human randomized control trials that detail the real world implications of eating or skipping breakfast we can see that the fear mongering is overplayed.

The most prominent model public figures use to convince people to skip breakfast is the Insulin Model of Obesity. Some of you may have heard this one before and I’ll explain it briefly. This model says that if you are carrying around extra fat on your body it is basically stuck there and inaccessible to burn if your insulin is chronically high. Insulin is commonly known as a “storage hormone” because it helps store sugar in your body’s cells. Conceptually this model makes sense because if your storage hormone is chronically elevated due to eating constantly throughout the day you would think your body wouldn’t be able to get rid of fat. However, this model is completely wrong and has tricked a lot of people.

Study after study has shown that when it comes down to it you will lose, gain, or maintain your weight based on three things; calories, protein, and fiber. If you equate all three of these variables a person will lose the exact same amount of weight no matter when they eat the food. There have been a couple studies showing that fasting is more effective than ad-libitum eating even when calories are equated, however these studies did not equate protein between groups with the fasting group consuming significantly more protein than the non-fasting group. In fact, every study that shows that fasting elicits superior weight loss is due to either lower calories consumed in the fasting group or they did not equate protein between groups.

If you are still skeptical about whether or not insulin is the cause of weight gain, let’s take a look at what could really be the nail in the coffin of this weight loss model. A drug called “semaglutide” has been in the news a lot lately and has gained major popularity as a “miracle” weight loss drug. Semaglutide is a GLP-1 agonist which means it actually stimulates the release of insulin among other things. So one of the most effective weight loss drugs that people are using today actually elevates your insulin levels. According to the Insulin Model of Obesity how can this make sense? It doesn’t.

Like I said before, researchers have failed to prove there is any benefit to intermittent fasting over traditional caloric restriction. This is to say when people implement a fasting protocol they basically always eat less food unintentionally. As of now, science is showing us that all of the benefits that people see from intermittent fasting are from just that; eating less food. So when you eat the food doesn’t really matter according to this model, because the only thing that matters is your total daily caloric intake.

Last year a paper was published in Cell Magazine that looked at early and late time restricted feeding (TRF) versus a control group. The early TRF group restricted their eating to 7am-1pm and the late TRF group only ate between noon and 6pm. Both groups ate ad-libitum during this window while a third group ate whenever they wanted and served as a control. As expected both TRF groups lost weight because their overall calories consumed were significantly less than the control group who did not lose weight. However, meaningful differences between those two groups were not found. This study supports the idea that a narrow feeding window aids in restricting daily calories which will lead to weight loss. However, it does not support the anti-breakfast fear mongers.

(Weight and fat mass in both time restricted groups were significantly lowered compared to control. However no significant difference was found between (TRF) groups.)

As we can see there really isn’t any solid evidence showing us that breakfast is standing in the way between us and our weight loss goals. In fact, eating a bigger breakfast may increase energy expenditure throughout the day according to several studies. When it comes down to it I recommend eating in whatever pattern is best for you that fuels your workouts and puts you in a slight calorie deficit if weight loss is your goal. If skipping breakfast helps with that then by all means!

In strength,

Mark Kolding, M.S.
Personal Trainer/Triathlon Coach
ACSM CPT
510-734-2817