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?
29. And if you must eat breakfast?
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 Times report of the study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition might have read:
A recent study by Louisiana State University that was funded by – and performed jointly with – PepsiCo (which owns the Quaker Oats Company) found that a 250-calorie serving of oatmeal for breakfast resulted in a slightly reduced calorie intake at lunch compared with an equivalent serving of Honey Nut Cheerios. Eating any cereal, however, greatly increases the total daily calorie intake, and only if breakfast were actually skipped would the total calorie intake have fallen.
That little story summarises this book.
Every morning Providence provides us with a precious gift, the gift of fasting. Overnight we digest the food we’ve eaten the day before, and by morning our metabolism has transitioned from feeding to fasting mode.
Fasting is a wonderfully healthy state. When we fast, our insulin levels fall, as do our blood sugar, triglyceride and cholesterol levels. Most usefully, when we fast, we lose weight. But what do too many of us do on waking? We break that lovely gift of fasting – we literally breakfast – and we eat, so courting type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, strokes, hypertension, dementia and cancers of the liver, breast, pancreas and uterus.
Breakfast damages us in at least four different ways. First, it increases (not decreases) the number of calories we consume. Second, it provokes hunger pangs later in the day. Third, it aggravates the metabolic syndrome, which is the mass killer of our day, which – fourth – is further aggravated by the fact that breakfast is generally a carbohydrate-laden meal.
Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but only if we skip it.
On 24 May 2010 my wife drove me to our family doctor’s surgery and told me not to emerge without a diagnosis. Over the previous two or so months I had started to feel increasingly thirsty, and I had not only started to drink water all day but I had also started to pee all day. And all night. I was losing weight, my muscles were wasting away with a strange ‘crackling’ ache, and I felt tired all the time. I even woke in the morning feeling tired. Clearly, my wife said, I had developed diabetes, and she was irritated by my assurances that if we ignored the symptoms they might go away. So it was she who made the appointment to see our doctor, and it was she who drove us to the surgery to ensure I kept it.
I told