Should I worry about skipping breakfast?

On some level, it sort of makes sense that breakfast should have a place in the food hierarchy that other meals don’t. The clue’s in the name: you are literally “breaking” your “fast” – taking your body from a state of deprivation to its first significant calorie hit.

But the idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day really only developed around the same time that John Harvey Kellogg was touting cornflakes as an alternative to moral impurity – with the suggestion that meat and heavily seasoned foods inflamed sinful urges. So, if you skip breakfast, are you really setting yourself up for failure – dietary or otherwise? And, considering the results being offered for various forms of fasting, could it even somehow help?

Well, first, the relationship between skipping breakfast and weight loss – or gain – is far from clear. An analysis published in 2021 of short and long-term studies concluded that there was “minimal evidence that breakfast skipping might lead to weight gain and the onset of overweight and obesity”.

Slightly more concerning is the evidence that skipping breakfast might mean you’re eating worse overall – research by Ohio State University covering more than 30,000 Americans concluded that breakfast-dodgers often miss out on important nutrients including vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and D. It also found that participants who skipped breakfast were more likely to eat more sugar and carbohydrates over the course of a typical day – and to snack more.

But – get it printed on a T-shirt – correlation is not causation, and all this really means is that the sort of people who tend to skip breakfast are often also the sort who don’t eat that well the rest of the time. It’s not an inevitable relationship – so if you can give the Weetabix a miss but make up for it over the rest of the day, are you in the clear?

Short answer: probably. “In my experience, people who skip breakfast can fall into the mindset of thinking that, because they’ve ‘saved’ calories first thing, they can treat themselves over the rest of the day,” says Aroosha Nekonam, a certified personal trainer at Ultimate Performance. “And because they’re so hungry, they give in to the temptation of eating high sugar, high carbohydrate foods for instant gratification, which spikes their blood sugar, and leaves them sluggish when their blood sugar level crashes. But for people who don’t give in to this temptation, there’s research to suggest that skipping breakfast or extended fasts can reduce markers of inflammation, oxidative stress and blood pressure.”

Longer fasts can also trigger a process called autophagy, which is the removal of damaged cells from your body – some researchers are looking at the possibility that this might lower the risk of certain forms of cancer, but evidence is far from conclusive, and skipping breakfast alone probably won’t kickstart the process.

The take-home message, then, is that there’s no clearcut benefit to being a skipper or an eater – as long as what you eat is healthy in the first place. “One of the most important things for people to understand is why they want to skip their breakfast,” says Nekonam. “Some people are more energised and more productive on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, or simply aren’t hungry when they wake up. If you’re trying to gain muscle then skipping breakfast is an obvious no-no – you need energy, and it’s completely counter-productive.”

The important thing to remember, says Nekonam, is to ensure that when you do eventually break your fast, you eat the right foods. Every meal should include 20 to 30g of lean protein, plus vegetables, and “healthy” fats. She adds: “Eating a bowl of highly processed cereal can have a very different physiological and psychological effect on your health compared to a lean cut of grass-fed beef or some free-range eggs, regardless of whether you’re eating at 9am or 1pm.”

Oh, and by the way, even if Kellogg’s Corn Flakes could prevent your sinful urges, that wouldn’t necessarily be good for you anyway. But that’s a subject for another column.