Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing
Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but only if we skip it.Since Victorian times, we have been told to breakfast like kings and dine like paupers. In the wake of his own type 2 diabetes diagnosis, Professor Terence Kealey was given the same advice. He soon noticed that his glucose levels were unusually high after eating first thing in the morning. But if he continued to fast until lunchtime they fell to a normal level. Professor Kealey began to question how much evidence there was to support the advice he’d been given, and whether there might be an advantage for some to not eating breakfast after all.Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal asks:• What is the reliable scientific and medical evidence for eating breakfast?• Why do people suppose that eating breakfast reduces the total amount of food they consume over the day, when the opposite is true?• Who should consider intermittent fasting by removing breakfast from their daily routine?• From weight loss to reduced blood pressure, what are the potential benefits of missing breakfast?
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4th Estate
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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © Terence Kealey 2016
Diagrams redrawn by Martin Brown
Cover image © Keenan
The right of Terence Kealey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It should be used to supplement rather than replace the advice of your doctor or another trained health professional. If you know or suspect you have a health problem, it is recommended that you seek your GP’s advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. This publisher and the author accept no liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.
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Source ISBN: 9780008172367
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008172350
Version: 2017-04-27
To my wife, Sally
Contents
PART TWO: The Dubious Advocates of Breakfast
2. The glorification of breakfast
3. Breakfast in an age of commercial science
4. Myth No. 1: Breakfast cereals are healthy
5. Myth No. 2: Breakfast is good for the brain
6. Myth No. 3: Breakfast is slimming
PART FOUR: The Breakfast Paradox
10. The Harvard and Cambridge challenges
11. The heroic breakfast guerrillas
PART SIX: Misleading Experiments
12. Blood glucose and breakfast: the unhealthy majority
13. Blood glucose and breakfast: the healthy minority
14. Why have the scientists claimed breakfast to be safe?
PART SEVEN: How Breakfast Kills Us
PART EIGHT: Insulin, the Great Traitor
16. The carbohydratisation of the English-speaking breakfast
17. Nothing about breakfast makes sense except in the light of insulin
18. Diabesity, the big new disease
19. Insulin-resistance, the modern plague
22. The biochemists have been warning us for nearly a century that breakfast is dangerous
PART NINE: Skipping Breakfast: Personal Stories
PART TEN: How Insulin Kills Us
24. What a modern plague looks like: the metabolic syndrome
25. Can we reverse the metabolic syndrome?
27. Type 3 diabetes (and other consequences of the metabolic syndrome)
PART ELEVEN: If You Must Eat Breakfast, What Must You Eat?
I was contracted to submit the first draft of this manuscript to my publishers on 31 January 2016. The day before, on 30 January, The Times trailed on its front page an article by Angela Epstein, a health journalist, entitled ‘Eight great weight-loss myths’. Skipping breakfast was myth number four:
A recent study by Louisiana State University found that a 250-calorie serving of oatmeal [porridge] for breakfast resulted in reduced calorie intake at lunch.
Some people like to do the crossword, but my morning hobby is to find the catch in claims that breakfast is good for me, so where was this article’s catch? I had twenty-four hours in which to uncover it.
It wasn’t hard to locate the study, which had just been published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, where I discovered that it had actually come jointly from Louisiana State University and PepsiCo (which owns the Quaker Oats Company).>1 That is obviously a different provenance than from Louisiana State University alone.
The study showed, moreover, that, compared with a breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios, a bowl of Quaker Instant Oatmeal slightly reduced the amount eaten subsequently at lunch; but the study did not compare subjects who ate a bowl of Quaker Instant Oatmeal with those who’d actually skipped breakfast, because no subjects were asked to skip it. Why not?
Well, it so happens that, contrary to what most people believe, eating breakfast significantly increases your total intake of calories: though eating breakfast may reduce your calorie intake at lunch, the calories you consume at breakfast will greatly exceed the ones they displace at lunch. So a fuller
