As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated.
At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was … the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.
[…]
A closer look at the way that government nutritionists adopted the breakfast warning for the Dietary Guidelines shows how loose scientific guesses — possibly right, possibly wrong — can be elevated into hard-and-fast federal nutrition rules that are broadcast throughout the United States.
The basic rule is, If you’re not hungry, don’t eat.
How could you perform at your best (mentally or physically ) if you haven’t eaten in 18 hours?
Depending on the age of the individual, a four week study might prove inconclusive. Other factors like body type, mass, etc. would need to be considered. A study of a year would be a better test.
not eating is a sure fire way to lose weight.
Or eat what you like but don’t swallow.
Been doing this for years, and long before their was a name for it. It’s called intermittent fasting; a daily 14-16hr fast while still consuming your necessary calories. I’ve learned that my body best works this way.
Less food, lose weight
Shear genius , who comes up with these ideas?
overweight people lose weight when they don’t eat breakfast, just what where they skipping? double double coffee bacon eggs hashbrowns toast butter jam sweetened orange juice…probably not yogurt granola and fruit
Cal @. Probibly the same genius who came up with this Global Warming theory with a short curcited brain
Put on your sweater or you’ll catch a cold. Don’t eat before swimming or you’ll get stomach cramps. Worrying causes ulcers. Amazing how all things that have been engrained in our culture as obvious are wrong. It has made me a total cynic.
I graze all day and evening.
Generally if I stay away from junk food weight is not an issue.
Breakfast should be treated like any other meal/snack. Source of energy.
I enjoy a good breakfast but many mornings I’m just not hungry so I don’t bother eating. Always seemed natural to me, but I long ago learned to be skeptical of many dietary claims such as salt, meat, eggs, etc. being evil.
As for shedding pounds, it is simply calories in vs calories burned, and without regular exercise, starvation is virtually the only natural route to rapid weight loss. But be prepared to lose muscle along with that fat.
BTW, it is waaaay past time to crack down on the fraud-filled diet/nutrition industries and their seeming freedom to hawk almost any bullshit weight-loss scam with impunity.
Indeed, cutting out food certainly can result in lost weight but the trick is to know what kind of ‘weight’ you just lost. If you lost precious muscle in and amongst some fat then you may be a bigger loser than you think.
It’s counter intuitive but you have to eat to lose weight. In fact, that moniker is wrong. We should be obsessed with losing fat – not weight. As we age, and especially after mid-30s, muscle mass decreases. A decrease in metabolism results in making ‘fat’ gain easier.
There is no silver bullet to weight control but sensible portions and regular exercise could lead to optimal results.
So many of those things that were considered bad are now thought
to be good and vise versa. These debates have raged for longer
than I have been alive and will continue to the end of time.
There is even recent evidence that cholesterol is not the killer
it was once thought to be. Coffee and alcohol, pork, red meat,
etc., are all OK.
PS Chemists have just admitted that alcohol is indeed a solution!
I come from a family fraught with obesity. I’ve never eaten breakfast – can’t – just not hungry. Have to be awake & conscious a couple of hours first. Then I like an early lunch, then a full dinner, mostly healthy snacks in evening; and I don’t have weight or diabetes problems.
Eat better food and don’t over feed yourself. I’m the same weight now in my 50’s as I was in my twenties. ( PS, don’t have to take any Rx meds either as I’m aware they can have an effect on some for appetite and/or weight gain/loss. )
I get up around 6 most mornings, shower, and get on my bike for a 30-minute ride to work. Coffee until noon, when I have my ‘big meal’, which is almost always a salad with a can of tuna/chicken/ham tossed on top. Get home around 4:30 after another 30-min bike ride, small snack, medium dinner, a couple of after-dinner snacks. Following this regime, I’ve lost 50 lbs in 20 months. And to boot, I’m diabetic, for whom the prevailing wisdom is “NEVER skip breakfast!”.
Front page of the Post today: “Butter won’t kill you, but margarine might” – digging into the article, it was revealed that the “scientific” discovery that saturated fat is bad – BAD! – for you was based on cherry-picked data from 6 of 16 countries studied, and that subsequent studies have shown no correlation between reasonable consumption of animal fats (beef, pork, dairy) and heart disease, but consumption of trans-fats – like those found in many margarines – does have a significant (~30%) risk of increased heart attacks.
As an engineer, false, cherry-picked, made-up, or ‘adjusted’ data is anathema to me, which is why I’ve been so vocal about the global-warming/climate change fraud. When the so-called ‘scientists’ have a political agenda, it has been shown time and again that truth is their first sacrifice. Feh.
Good point Kevin. But as an engineer any falsification results in
machinery, electronics, bridges and such not working. I have always
had a hatred for activist scientists like those idiots at the
Center for Science in the Public Interest. I have a bad heart,
but I really miss the fantastic butter substitute they used in
the movie theaters. But a handful of people with questionable
scientific credentials went on a Jihad and got it banned.
The only people I hold in lower regard are the global warming
nuts!
So French fries cooked in beef tallow are actually healthier than those cooked in the “healthy” trans-fats that replaced those nasty animal fats. They’re a durn sight tastier, too. The shop that goes back to beef tallow will get my patronage!!
Anyone who wants to lose weight needs to eat meat, filet is nice, and other proteins plus veggies and some berries.
Well, little wonder the study showed what it did. A high-carb breakfast of oatmeal or frosted flakes would cause a blood sugar surge, an insulin rush and reactive hypoglycemia and set the daily metabolism into sugar-dependence. A zero-breakfast would leave the body in a fat-burning state with steady blood sugar. A better test would have been to have a low-carb breakfast of bacon and eggs or such. Personally it works better for me to have a substantial low-carb breakfast and a modest dinner early in the evening. This morning my blood sugar was 3.8 and ketones 3.5, for example, so I had already been firmly in fat-burning nutritional ketosis for a long period. There are many ways to achieve the same goals that will be better or worse adapted to a person’s unique metabolic profile.
The calories in calories out model is as useful as the “earn more and spend less” solution to poverty.
People generally reverse cause and effect, as Nietzsche observed in The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols. We do not become fat because we eat too much and exercise too little, we exercise less and eat more because we are getting fat.
If those who skipped breakfast otherwise ate as they normally would have, then of course the calorie deficit will result in weight loss. If they really wanted to test whether breakfast as a time to eat mattered or not, I would think they should have had all subjects eat the same total amount of calories in a day, just spread out differently for breakfast or no breakfast and see if that makes a difference.
Seems to me I’ve heard of studies on intermittent fasting saying it does, such that there’s more weight loss from eating 1800 calories over a 10 hour window with a 14 hour fast versus 1800 calories over a 16 hour window with just 8 hours of sleep being a fast, but It’s not something I’m well-versed in.
The main beneficial effect of the mini-fast is to allow insulin levels in the blood to return to baseline for at least one extended period in 24 hours. How long an intermittent fast is necessary depends on activity level, what is eaten and prior metabolic state (such as the extent of fatty liver in the person).