Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby

Breakfast—The Most Important Meal, or the Most Marketed?

• Dr. Bobby Dubois • Season 1 • Episode 77

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In this episode of Live Long and Well, Dr. Bobby looks at the evidence behind breakfast—not as a slogan, but as a real-life question: what problem is breakfast solving?

For some people, breakfast may help with blood sugar, protein intake, morning exercise, or avoiding late-day overeating. For others, skipping breakfast may work perfectly well. And for many adults, “breakfast” may really mean coffee—which can improve alertness and exercise performance, but is not the same as food, protein, fiber, or fuel.

Dr. Bobby also explores where the breakfast slogan came from, including its ties to cereal companies, health reformers, and early public relations campaigns. The episode then compares breakfast, lunch, and dinner through three practical questions:

  1. Does this meal help my body and health?
    Weight, blood sugar, disease risk, protein, and muscle.
  2. Does this meal help me perform today?
    Exercise, energy, focus, cognition, and school performance.
  3. Does this meal help me live well?
    Family rhythm, connection, and the social meaning of meals.

The conclusion: there is probably no single “most important meal” for everyone. The best meal is the one that helps you live the day you are actually trying to live.

In this episode

  • Why “breakfast is the most important meal” may be more marketing than medical fact
  • What observational studies suggest about breakfast skipping and heart disease risk
  • Why healthy-user bias makes breakfast research tricky
  • What randomized trials show about breakfast, skipping breakfast, weight loss, and metabolism
  • How chrononutrition raises a better question: are we eating too much too late?
  • Why coffee may help you skip breakfast—but does not replace breakfast nutritionally
  • When eating before morning exercise matters
  • What we know about breakfast, cognition, and school performance in children
  • Why “hangry” may be real
  • How breakfast, lunch, and dinner each serve different roles
  • How to decide whether breakfast matters for you

Key takeaways

Breakfast does not magically turn on your metabolism.
Randomized trials do not show that simply adding breakfast leads to meaningful weight loss.

Skipping breakfast is not automatically harmful.
It may work well for some people, especially if it reduces total calories without causing overeating later.

The observational data are complicated.
Breakfast skippers often look less healthy in long-term studies, but they may also smoke more, sleep less, exercise less, work irregular schedules, or eat more late at night.

Chrononutrition gives breakfast its strongest argument.
The body may handle calories better earlier in the day than late at night. The issue may be less “everyone must eat breakfast” and more “be careful about pushing most calories to the evening.”

Coffee is not breakfast.
Coffee may improve alertness and exercise performance, and it may reduce appetite for a while. But it is not protein, fiber, or fuel.

Kids are different.
For a hungry child, breakfast may matter for learning readiness, behavior, and attention.

Exercise changes the answer.
For a short, easy workout, coffee and water may be enough. For a long run, long ride, intervals, or race-like effort, food or carbohydrate may help.

Dinner may win the connection argument.
Shared meals are strongly linked with well-being. Dinner may not be best for blood sugar, but it may be powerful for family, friendship, and decompression.

Lunch deserves more respect.
Lunch may be the underrated meal that prevents the 3 p.m. slump and the 9 p.m. snack attack.

A practical experiment

Rather than adopting a slogan, try a personal experiment.

For two weeks, eat a real breakfast with protein, fiber, and minimal added sugar. Track your hunger, mood, exercise quality, afternoon energy, evening snacking, and sleep.

Then, if it is safe for you, try two weeks of delaying or skipping breakfast while keeping your coffee/caffeine routine consistent.

Ask yourself:

  • Do I feel better or worse?
  • Do I eat less overall—or make it up later?
  • Are my workouts better or worse?
  • Am I sharper or more irritable?
  • Does skipping breakfast lead to a chaotic dinner?
  • Am I still getting enough protein?

The question is not whether breakfast works in theory. The question is whether breakfast works for you.

Who should be more cautious about skipping breakfast?

Be more careful with breakfast skipping if you are a child or adolescent, pregnant, diabetic, prone to low blood sugar, have a history of eating disorders, do long or intense morning workouts, or struggle to get enough protein—especially as an older adult.

Dr. Bobby’s bottom line

For me, breakfast is not the most important meal most days.

If I have a long workout ahead, I eat breakfast. Coffee alone is not enough.

If I am just writing, reading, or working in the morning, coffee may be enough until I am actually hungry.

And if I am eating with family or friends, breakfast matters for a different reason. Sometimes the table matters more than the eggs.

Maybe breakfast is not the most important meal of the day.

Maybe it is the most marketed.

The most important meal is the one that helps you live the day you are actually trying to live.


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The Breakfast Question That Matters

SPEAKER_00

I woke up this morning at my usual early hour, around five AM. Made coffee with my new barista machine. And so there I was with my coffee, working on a new podcast episode and reading through the latest health studies that had come across my desk. A pretty typical morning for me. Then it was seven o'clock time for exercise. But here's the question. I wasn't really hungry yet. For me, coffee tends to reduce my appetite at least for a while. So should I eat breakfast before exercising? Or is coffee enough? And even if I weren't exercising, should I eat breakfast anyways? We've all heard the saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But is it? Where did that idea come from? Was it science or tradition or marketing? Does the evidence actually support it? Gail and I have a line we use all the time. Inquiring minds want to know. And inquiring minds really do want to know this one because breakfast could affect weight loss, cognition, school performance, or exercise. Does breakfast deserved the hallowed title of most important meal of the day? Let's find out. Hi, I'm Dr. Bobby Du Bois, and welcome to Live Long and Well, a podcast about what the evidence can and can't tell us about living healthier lives. As a physician, scientist, Iron Man triathlete, and author of several hundred scientific papers, I read the studies so you don't have to, helping you cut through the hype, focus on what actually works, and make better choices for your health. Welcome, my dear listeners, to today's episode. Breakfast, the most important meal, or the most marketed. We've all heard the advice. Eat your breakfast. Breakfast starts your metabolism. Breakfast helps you lose weight. Breakfast helps kids learn. Breakfast fuels your day. But is that true? Here's a problem. We can't really answer is breakfast the most important meal until we answer best meal for what? And the moment you list the four what's, you see why no single meal can likely win everything. Does breakfast uniquely help you lose weight, have energy to exercise, stay sharp at 10 a.m., get enough protein, connect with people you love. A meal, a meal could be great for one and completely irrelevant to another. My hope for today, as always, is to give you criteria, and then of course you decide which meal might be the most important. And spoiler alert, it might not be breakfast. So

A Simple Scorecard For Any Meal

SPEAKER_00

my first step here wasn't to find evidence. It was to build a scorecard with three questions. One, does eating breakfast change my body and my health? My weight, blood sugar, disease risk, protein, muscle. Second question, does it help me perform today? Energy for exercise, mental focus, and sharpness. Question three, does breakfast help me live well? Connections and family rhythm. But often things are more complicated. So there are other considerations. For whom? Things, your answers may differ. You know, a well-fed adult or a hungry kid, an endurance athlete, an older adult chasing protein? Same meal, different verdict. And compared to what? Is breakfast the most important meal of the day compared to a tiny breakfast? Skipping breakfast? A bigger lunch, just coffee? So it is more complicated, but I hope by the end I will walk through those three questions, give you answers from my standpoint, and then hopefully help you decide. But before we dive into the history of this saying, many of you signed up already for Dr. Bobby's one-page prescriptions. These are these one-page PDFs that give you kind of the action items from each episode and the next steps that you might take. Let me know what you think of those. If you haven't signed up or haven't signed up for my newsletter, just go to the uh show notes and there'll be a link there, or just go to my website, uh drbobbyevidence.com.

How Breakfast Became A Slogan

SPEAKER_00

Okay, the history. Breakfast is the most important meal. Guess what? It didn't come from a medical breakthrough. It began a couple hundred years ago, 150 years ago, anyways, by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. If that name sounds familiar, Kellogg, stay tuned. So he built a sanitarium part spa, part hospital, part hotel in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was really, in some respects, the first longevity guru. His gospel was biologic living. A lot of vegetarianism, no alcohol or coffee, lots of exercise. Now, uh, cereal was an accident. In the 1890s, they had some wheat dish, side dish that was um made for the folks at the sanitarium for dinner. And they left this wheat out overnight. And they came back the next day, and it was flaky and crispy. It became, obviously, the first ready-to-eat flaked cereal. And he served it to the folks there. Now he didn't add sugar, he didn't add salt. It was a little bland, but that was the origin. Now, his brother, John's brother, W.K. Kellogg, said, hmm, there's a business here. So he added sugar and salt. Of course, the doctor wasn't happy about all that, and he launched the Kellogg's Company in 1906. An ex-patient at the sanitarium, CW Post, copied the same idea into what became grape nuts. Now, the phrase itself came from that sanitarium by dietitian Lena Cooper. And that was she was mentored by Kellogg, and she wrote an article in their magazine, Good Health. And the title was The Meal That Starts the Day. And it goes, yet, in many ways, breakfast is the most important meal of the day because it's the meal that gets the day started. It should not be eaten hurriedly, and all the family, so far as possible, should partake of it together. Now, it's a pretty reasonable health idea, which obviously became a business. Okay, so breakfast, interesting, but it hasn't yet become the most important meal of the day. Then in the 1920s, Edward Bernays, who was, became the father of public relations. He worked for beechnut. Now, in the day, bacon was the key product for uh beechnut. Now, of course, they're primarily in the baby food business. Turns out that gentleman was Sigmund Freud's nephew. And he used psychology, obviously, this stuff from his uncle, to influence minds. And he was basically employed to make bacon a part of the breakfast. So, how did he do this? Well, at the time, breakfast was pretty light. Yeah, maybe coffee, a roll. And so what Bernays did is he went to the company doctor. They actually had a company doctor, and said, Well, what do you think about having a more full breakfast? And the doctor said, Oh, that's a great idea. So Bernays said, Okay, I want you to reach out to 5,000 other doctors, see what they think. And it turns out 4,500 of them agreed that a full breakfast, you know, breakfast being the most important meal of the day, was the way to go. And as they say, the rest is history. Now, 70% of bacon is eaten at breakfast, and it's the classic bacon and egg American breakfast. But marketed doesn't mean it's wrong. So let's return to our three criteria. Does breakfast influence our body, our mind, and relationships? So let's dig in. Question

Health Claims And The Evidence Gaps

SPEAKER_00

one Does it change my body and health? Well, if we think about that, there's a couple of sub-points I'd want to walk through. First, argument the disease risk claim. In many, many studies, people who skipped breakfast look worse, did worse. So a U.S. study of about 6,000 people followed those people for 20 years or so, and they found that those who never consume breakfast had an 87% increase risk for cardiovascular mortality compared with daily breakfast consumers. And this was after adjusting for their diet quality, their lifestyle, their BMI and cardiovascular risk factors. So this would suggest skipping breakfast is bad and dangerous and will cause you to die. And within the data, there's a suggestion of a dose response, which we like to see in observational studies, meaning the more you skipped breakfast, the worse things were. But what complicates this study, which is what keeps me enjoying doing what I'm doing, is that this study has a healthy user bias. Breakfast eaters are not identical in other ways to non-breakfast eaters. So when you look at breakfast causing mortality, not having breakfast causes mortality, you've got to be careful because people who eat breakfast tend to sleep better, smoke less, drink less, and keep pretty steady schedules. Contrast, people who skip breakfast often are rushed, stressed. They may do shift work, so breakfast doesn't really fit in, or they're skipping breakfast because they're already overweight in dieting. People who do healthy things often do many healthy things. So skipping breakfast may have other not-so-healthy behaviors associated with it. Another example is people skip breakfast may eat way too much late at night at dinner. Unfortunately, there are no randomized control trials looking at mortality in this way. Okay, so a little bit of a murky story there. Second argument, common wisdom. Eat breakfast to lose weight. Now, let's think about this. If breakfast adds calories by its very definition, and you don't cut them later in the day, why would we expect eating breakfast would lead to weight loss? Well, there was an article that summarized the breakfast weight loss randomized trials. The result, again, not surprisingly, adding breakfast didn't help weight loss. Turned out breakfast eaters actually took in, not surprisingly, more total daily calories. And people who skipped breakfast ended up being slightly lighter, less weight. Now, let's think about it from reverse. Ask people to skip breakfast. And in a summary of seven randomized controlled trials, they showed that skipping breakfast led to about one pound of weight loss over about two months. And this sort of gave rise to the focus on intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating. And by all means, listen to my episode on weight loss that will give you background on whether that is a good approach or not. Okay, so the third way to think about whether breakfast is right for you from a physical body standpoint is the blood sugar claim or chrononutrition. Okay, so this is the belief, this is the theory that when you eat matters not just how much you eat. So in the morning, our cortisol levels are measurably higher. Our insulin secretion and sensitivity to the insulin are higher early in the day. And as the theory, hypothesis mechanism goes, eating at that time of day, because your various hormone levels are ramped up, you can use the food more productively. And it turns out, to make it even more complicated, is that we're not all the same in terms of chrononutrition or chronotype. There are night owls who like to stay up late and sleep later. There are morning larks like me who like to get up early and go to sleep early. So we're all different. Therefore, our biology is going to be different. Our cortisol and insulin secretion is going to be different at different times of day. This whole area of chronotype and whether one is more healthy than another and how you might work with your type is so fun that I'm going to have a completely separate episode on this topic. Okay, so the main point here is that the body handles food differently by time of day. Now, it's possible that eating earlier may be metabolically friendlier than late-night eating. All right, what about the evidence? There is a 2018 study of men with pre-diabetes. And in the study, they ate all their food before 3 p.m. What did they find? Early eating improved insulin sensitivity and blood pressure, even when they didn't really lose weight. So timing itself seemed to matter. And now studies showed that front loading calories led to three pounds more weight loss. But here's the problem the evidence certainty on those studies was low. You may have studies, they may even be randomized controlled trials, but every study may have high quality, low quality, this problem, that problem. So there was a lot of uncertainty. In a really well-designed study that was admittedly small, only 30 people who were obese, they randomized them to front-loading calories, meaning breakfast, or backloading calories, meaning eating more later in the day. And the differences were profound. Some people had 40%, 45% of their daily calories in the morning for breakfast, versus a group that only had 20%. So a big difference between whether you're going to eat a lot for breakfast, very little for breakfast, and see what happens. Well, what did they find out? Well, there was no difference in energy use. But the people who had larger calories for breakfast did seem to have a lower appetite. So theoretically, your body at 8 a.m. isn't metabolically identical to your body at 10 p.m. But the studies, as they often do, leave me uncertain. Now, maybe the real metabolic problem isn't skipping breakfast. It isn't skipping breakfast per se. It's saving up those calories for late at night. So it may not be just when you have those calories as breakfast. But if you're eating too late at night, a separate body of evidence says that's not so good. Okay, the fourth piece of does it affect your body is the protein claim. Now, breakfast is a place to spread the load of protein that you need. Let's say you need 90 grams of protein a day. Let me tell you, it's a lot harder to get those 90 grams of protein if you skip breakfast. Because then you got to jam it into lunch or dinner and a snack in the middle, and you may not get enough protein. So keep that in mind. All right, so question number one verdict: breakfast may not change your body directly, may not change it directly. Any effect of eating breakfast or not eating breakfast likely runs through whether it helps you eat better across the whole day. So eating or not eating breakfast is shaky as a weight loss tool. But changing your body is just one of the three buckets or questions. How about getting through the day?

Exercise Fuel And Mental Performance

SPEAKER_00

Remember, question two Does breakfast help me perform? All right, let's first look at breakfast or energy and exercise. Should you eat before exercise? In a study that looked at 46 studies underneath it, what they found, what they found was eating before exercised improved aerobic performance. So eating improved performance. So it would sound like, okay, I'm about to exercise, need to have a good breakfast. But here's the problem. Here's the interesting part. That relationship of better performance with prior eating only mattered for long aerobic performance, not short sessions. So if your workout is 20, 40, maybe 60 minutes, coffee and water are fine. But if you're going to have a long workout, maybe two hours, maybe three hours, fueling matters. It matters before you have your exercise and then during it. All right. Will coffee get you there? Well, coffee does improve exercise performance. And if you listen to my coffee episode, you can hear about the evidence supporting that. Coffee or caffeine may improve performance. And then you've got the combination of I had coffee with my breakfast. So it is a little complicated like most things. All right, another aspect of our mind and performance. How about cognitive sharpness? So a study from 10 years ago that summarized 36 studies on breakfast, classroom behavior, and academic performance. So this is really important because you hear breakfast is critical for kiddos and school and doing well in school. So what did they find? Mostly a positive relationship on kind of task-oriented classroom behavior. And the clearest academic gains of having breakfast was in undernourished children. As they say, it's hard to focus on fractions when you're waiting for lunch. So maybe there's a benefit for kids, so keep that in mind. But what about adults? There have been studies on whether breakfast or eating impacts your mental clarity and focus. There's a probably a small impact on memory, but not on your attention to something or executive function, which is decision making. So the main point here is for a well-fed adult, and probably most of us fit into that category, the cognitive effect of breakfast is modest and mixed. Now, for a hungry child, it's a different question. So for performance, our question two, is breakfast the most important meal? Well, it depends on the job. If you just want alertness, coffee handles it fine. But only food helps you fueling if you're doing a big long workout. Does breakfast win based upon mental and physical performance? Well, depends which meal precedes the thing you actually need to do well. If you're working out in the afternoon or want to concentrate carefully in the afternoon, breakfast is likely not to make a difference there.

Meals, Connection, And Living Well

SPEAKER_00

Question number three: Does breakfast help me live well? As you know, my podcast is Dr. Bobby, live long and well. We want to live long, of course, but we also want to live well. And meals can be social. Do listen to my episode on social connections and why that's so important for longevity. Food, thinking about it broadly, or meals, isn't just about fuel. Meals give us a rhythm to our day. It's cultural. Some cultures eat large lunches, some cultures eat late at night before bed. Our culture tends to eat a fair bit of breakfast. Meals are also part of connecting and decompressing at the end of the day. And this is where dinner usually is the winner. In an interesting study that used Gallup poll data from not just one or ten or a hundred countries, but 142 different countries. And they studied this issue of sharing a meal, whether you ate alone or you shared a meal with others. The result, how often people shared meals predicted their well-being, their happiness, and not surprisingly, loneliness. And it was as powerful having these meals together as the impact of income does on health and wellness and well-being. So this is not proven cost, cause and effect. And as it turns out, one in four Americans now report eating their meals alone. So here I'm not really giving you data about breakfast per se, but the importance of eating with others as a part of your considerations. So if you're having a meal and it's dinner with your family or friends, it generally will focus on how was your day, reflecting backwards. But if you're sharing a meal at breakfast, you're likely to focus on what's ahead and are you ready for the day. Okay, so now let's tally the scoreboard.

Who Should Prioritize Breakfast

SPEAKER_00

Yes, indeed, let's do that. The battle of the meals. So I set out three scorecard criteria. The impact of breakfast on your body, on your mind or performance, and on social connections. Three meals and potentially three different winners. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Okay, let me make this tangible. Breakfast wins as the most important meal of the day. If your goal is making sure you get early protein in the day, you want to have a circadian-friendly timing for your food. Or if you're fueling a hard morning workout, or kids and learning readiness, or a family launch pad in the day. Breakfast wins for you. Let me point out, I said for you, because those might be your goals. Dinner wins if your goal is connection and a satisfying end-of-day ritual. There is no single most important meal for everyone. The best meal of the day is the one that helps you have the day that you want and reach that happiness-wellness goals you have in mind. It's important for me to point out be more cautious about skipping breakfast if you are, again, a child, even an adolescent, if you're pregnant or diabetic. And of course, talk to your doctor. Okay, so we've been together here for a half hour or so. My answer. So after all of this, here's where I personally land. And notice, I'm not handing you a rule, I'm handing you my scorecard. You can apply it to your life. And your answers inevitably will be different, and it should. So, for me, and just for me, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. Now, that's not the same as I always skip breakfast. My real answer is depends upon what the day is asking of me. If I have a significant workout ahead, a long ride, long run, you know, a couple hours or so, I will eat breakfast. And that's to perform. You know, perform today, and that's important. So, as I said, if it's a long workout, I definitely want to fuel. And for that, coffee is not enough. Now, in about 30 minutes, I have my trainer Nina coming for my strength training workout. And it turns out I haven't had my breakfast yet. Well, it's not more than an hour workout, so maybe I'll have a banana or something just to get my system going. Not evidence-based, just what I tend to do. But if I'm just working, reading studies, writing, building an episode of my podcast like this one, my coffee is enough. The only problem I need to serve, uh solve is alertness, and coffee solves it for me. Food, if I were to have breakfast as well, would just be calories I don't necessarily need. Now, if I have an opportunity of eating with friends or family my breakfast, then of course breakfast jumps to high priority. That's the live well bucket and connection wins. On those mornings, eggs are beside the point. It's the table and those I care about sitting around. And if nothing is pushing me towards breakfast, no big workout, no people at my table, then I usually skip it and save those calories until I'm actually hungry. So is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Not for everyone. Not most days for me. So ask these questions. Does breakfast change your body, help you perform, or help you live well? If it solves a problem that matters to you, eat breakfast. If skipping breakfast leaves you feeling fine, skipping may be reasonable. And if your breakfast is really just coffee, it might be fine. Enjoy it. But know that it's not protein or fuel. Now, maybe breakfast isn't the most important meal today. Maybe it's mostly the marketing over the last couple hundred years. The most important meal is the one that helps you live the day you're actually trying to live. As always, this isn't about the perfect rule. It's about the pattern that helps you live long and well. What do you think? For you, is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Let me know. Thanks

Final Takeaways And Listener Question

SPEAKER_00

so much for listening to Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby. If you like this episode, please provide a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you want to continue this journey or want to receive my newsletter on practical and scientific ways to improve your health and longevity, please visit me at Dr. Bobby Livelongandwell.com. That's Doctor as a Dr Bobby Livelongandwell.com.