Hormones: Our hormones also don’t want us to lose weight; a research group from Melbourne, Australia, found that overweight or obese subjects, on losing a significant amount of weight, demonstrate – even a year after the diet has stopped – higher levels of hormones such as ghrelin (which increases hunger) and lower levels of hormones such as leptin (which decreases hunger).14
Genes: Is our weight determined by our genes or our environment? Professor Tim Spector, the twin expert from King’s College London, has found that: ‘on average identical adult twins are less than 1 kg different in weight.’15
Genetics, in short, play a huge role (about two-thirds of the influence) in setting a person’s weight,fn1 and only about a third of the influence is due to the environment.16 If we diet, therefore, in Professor Spector’s words: ‘Our bodies simply seem to adapt to the reduced calorie intake and do what they are programmed by evolution to do … This is why most diets fail.’17
Worryingly, weight-loss dieting might even induce weight gain. In 2012 a research group from Finland reported on identical twins where one of the twins had deliberately lost at least 5 kg (11 pounds, ¾ stone) on at least one occasion but where the other twin had never gone on a diet. And the dieters had eventually ended up, on average, 0.4 kg (1 pound) heavier than the non-dieters.18
Conclusion: A group from Switzerland, on reviewing the field, has concluded that slim people should never diet: they risk eventually putting on weight. Only large people should diet: only for them might it lead to weight loss.19
Dieting being unexpectedly problematic, we need to identify a strategy – a lifestyle – that allows people to lose weight and to keep it off. As we shall see, skipping breakfast will help achieve that.
There is another explanation for the apparent paradox of breakfast skippers being large: they may be leading chaotic lives. So a Finnish study of some 5,500 16-year-old girls and boys and their parents found that breakfast skippers tend to come from families that self-harm by:
smoking
failing to take sufficient exercise
neglecting education
consuming higher intakes of high-sugar, high-carbohydrate, high-fat snacks
drinking too much
being overweight.1
Extending those Finnish findings, a study from Rhode Island of nearly 10,000 adolescents showed a significant correlation between:
breakfast skipping
fast food eating
weight gain.2
But correlation is not causation, so we need to ask, is it the breakfast skipping or the fast food eating that is causing the weight gain in these adolescents? Dr Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota has answered that question. Dr Pereira followed 3,000 young adults over fifteen years, showing that those who ate at fast food restaurants more than twice a week gained an extra 10 pounds (4.5 kg), and had a twofold greater increase in insulin-resistance than those who ate there less than once a week.3 Dr Pereira therefore confirmed that fast food is dangerous food, if only because it is so high in calories: ‘a single meal from one of these restaurants often contains enough calories to satisfy a person’s caloric requirements for an entire day.’4
And who eats fast food? People who lead chaotic lives. Dr Pereira divided his subjects into blacks and whites, and because – for shameful historical reasons – black Americans are disadvantaged, Dr Pereira thus also provided a link between social class and fast food. And Dr Pereira found that, fifteen years into the study:
black people were visiting fast food restaurants 2.15 times a week against 1.60 times for white people
the black people in Dr Pereira’s study had nearly two years’ less education than white people
black people took three-quarters of the exercise of white people
black people watched nearly twice as much television as white people
black people ate some 400 calories more per day than white people
black people drank 50 per cent more soft drinks than white people
black people ate 50 per cent more meat than white people
black people ate significantly less fibre than white people.
So the Rhode Island study on nearly 10,000 adolescents may have shown a significant correlation between breakfast skipping, fast food eating and weight gain, but from Dr Pereira’s research we know it’s not the breakfast skipping that is causing the weight gain, it’s the fast food. And the fast food eating and the breakfast skipping have a common root in a chaotic lifestyle, so we can begin to see how breakfast skipping and overweight are not causally linked but, rather, reflect the actions of a separate, third, cause: domestic chaos leading to unhealthy life choices:
So we can see how breakfast skipping may be associated with, but not causative of, weight gain. Breakfast skipping per se, in isolation, will promote weight loss, but if it is linked with a package of weight-gaining activities, it will then be associated with weight gain, thus leading unsuspecting epidemiologists to suppose that eating breakfast causes weight loss.
We might make a comparison with smoking and teenage pregnancy. Teenagers who smoke are more likely to become pregnant but no one has suggested that smoking causes pregnancy.5 Rather, dysfunctional teenagers are more likely both to smoke and to become pregnant, but the causative agent is the dysfunction. Here is a model that captures that story:
The model is not:
dysfunctional teenagers → smoke → get pregnant
And to confirm that model of association, not causation, there has even been a report that Japanese girls who skip breakfast also start to have sex two years before their breakfast-eating sisters (at 17.5 rather than 19.4 years of age). The report has not got into an English-language peer-reviewed journal, but it came from the Japan Family Planning Association, which is credible.6 Here is a model that captures that story:
The model is not:
dysfunctional teenagers →