Is Skipping Breakfast Good or Bad?

A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology suggests not just that "skipping" breakfast is bad, but that it CAUSES hardening of the arteries! Skipping breakfast is called a "bad habit" which leads to other "bad habits" according to researchers in Madrid, Spain.

Study author Valentin Fustin, MD, PhD, director of Mt Sinai Heart, claims that people who regularly skip breakfast have an overall unhealthy lifestyle, including overeating later in the day, smoking, over-consumption of alcohol, and an overall poor diet.

Getting into the specifics of this study, just over 4000 volunteer participants (both male and female) were selected based on their lack of cardiovascular disease. Out of these, less than 3% were identified as breakfast skippers, those who consumed less than 5% of their calories in the morning. Not exactly a massive sampling! 69% consumed a small breakfast, while the remaining 27% consumed at least 20% of daily calories at breakfast. The conclusions about the effects of skipping breakfast are thus based on the results of only 120 participants.

In addition, these 120 breakfast skippers also happened to be obese, had the highest waist-to-hip ratios, the highest BMIs, highest blood pressure, and highest fasting glucose levels of all the study participants. As I already mentioned, these participants who skipped breakfast had poor overall diets, overate late in the day, smoked, and frequently consumed alcohol. The study author briefly mentions that reverse causation could be a factor. You think???

I have a very hard time understanding how you can take a group of people who are making myriad unhealthy choices (such as smoking, excessive drinking, poor overall diet, obesity) and then decide that it is the lack of breakfast which has caused the hardening of their arteries! It truly baffles my mind. How can these cardiologists suggest that just adding some breakfast can miraculously clear out their clogged arteries? While these obese participants continue smoking and drinking and eating garbage for the rest of the day? Because this is the ridiculous conclusion they came to: changing just the "bad" habit of skipping breakfast can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease!

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that I am a breakfast skipper. Only I don't call it "skipping breakfast". I call it intermittent fasting. If you google "intermittent fasting and cardiovascular disease" you can read about various studies which have determined that fasting IMPROVES blood pressure levels, triglycerides, fasting blood glucose levels, and assists in weight loss. Our ancestors regularly fasted--whenever food supplies were low, certainly during the winter months. Their eating patterns followed a "feast or famine" cycle, where they might overeat when fresh food was available and fast at other times, not by choice but by necessity. We are built to sustain periods without food.

Yes, "skipping" breakfast is associated with obesity. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation. Does skipping breakfast CAUSE obesity? Of course not. Skipping breakfast might be typical for many who are obese, but it is what those folks eat during the rest of the day that either causes weight gain or facilitates weight loss.

Does skipping breakfast CAUSE hardening of the arteries? I can't believe anyone could even suggest something so obviously ridiculous.