The breakfast mantras: It was in 1847, in the fourth edition of his Treatise on Diet and Regimen, that Dr William Robertson, who practised medicine in Buxton, Derbyshire, UK, wrote that ‘Breakfast should always be an important, if not the most important, meal of the day.’22 As I have already noted, Dr Robertson was a prominent physician, so it behoves us to ask: what research led him to coin that momentous phrase? Which careful observations, which controlled experiments, underpinned that weighty idiom? Well, this is what he wrote: ‘Breakfast is very properly made to consist of a considerable proportion of liquids, to supply the loss of the fluids of the body during the hours of sleep.’
Eh? It is true we lose water through our lungs and sweat glands as we sleep, but why was Dr Robertson so fixated on that? Well, Dr Robertson was a water physician: he practised in Buxton, which was a spa town whose waters were believed to cure myriad diseases, so of course Dr Robertson believed that water lay at the heart of health and illness. But that belief – which is barely more advanced than Hippocrates’ belief in the four humours – is an absurdity. Yet Dr Robertson was no one-trick pony, and he also believed that ‘the nervous system is restored by sleep to its fullest power and activity,’ and that we should therefore eat early ‘before the nervous system has become expended by its mental and physical labours’, which is a further absurdity.
The other great breakfast mantra is, of course, Adelle Davis’s injunction to ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.’23 Adelle Davis (1904–74) was the most popular nutritionist in America of her day, and though she was a controversial figure who was regularly accused of misusing science to promote dietary fads, she sold over 10 million copies of books with titles such as Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954). As to her famous mantra, let us ask: what was the thinking behind it? Did it emerge from the systematic scientific study of a problem that is still urgent today, or did it emerge out of a health scare that has since been discredited?
Post-war, America went through a strange panic over low blood sugar levels, and a charity called the Hypoglycemia Foundation claimed that ‘There is probably no illness today which causes so much widespread suffering, so much inefficiency and loss of time, so many accidents, so many family breakups and so many suicides as hypoglycemia.’24
The media followed suit, and a magazine such as Family Circle could in June 1965 assert that ‘millions among us … suffer unknowingly from low blood sugar’ while Town and Country could state in June 1971 that ‘ten million Americans have hypoglycaemia.’ Respected professionals fed the national anxiety, and a psychiatrist wrote that
‘about half of the people I see for psychiatric problems have abnormal blood sugar … the incidence in schizophrenia is high and in neuroses even higher.’25
Adelle Davis herself asserted that ‘irritability resulting from low blood sugar can be a factor in divorces.’26
It is rare for a bizarre new idea to emerge without someone, somewhere, profiting from it, and it appears that the hypoglycaemia scare coincided with the discovery that adrenal extracts – which were expensive and therefore profitable to administer – could ‘cure’ hypoglycaemia; but the respectable authorities rallied against the charlatans, and in 1973 the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Endocrine Society published a joint statement saying that few Americans suffer from low blood sugar levels, which in any case were not dangerous:
Statement on Hypoglycemia
Recent publicity in the popular press has led the public to believe that the occurrence of hypoglycemia is high in this country and that many of the symptoms that affect the American population are not recognised as being caused by this condition. These claims are not supported by the medical evidence.27
Adelle Davis, therefore, coined her great aphorism to address a non-problem: she knew that the blood sugar levels of breakfast skippers fell gently during the mornings,28 and since raised blood sugar levels are one of the great killers of our time, so the same data that inspired Davis’s mantra should now inspire its revision: Eat breakfast like a pauper.
We see, therefore, that the two popular breakfast mantras were coined to address the non-problems of night-time dehydration, night-time starvation, brain fatigue and rampant hypoglycaemia, yet those mantras remain so potent that many people today believe they have a metabolic duty to eat breakfast. In a world where millions of people overeat, their pushing themselves to eat a meal they might otherwise skip is not a trivial matter.
The Mediterranean breakfast: Judging by the longevities of the people who eat it, the Mediterranean diet is healthier than that of northern Europe or North America, and in his 2003 book Food in Early Modern Europe Ken Alabala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific, California, notes that in southern Europe breakfast never really developed: ‘In countries where the evening meal was larger, breakfast did not become important. In southern Europe it is still not a proper meal, but merely coffee and perhaps a piece of bread or pastry. In England and the north [of Europe] the pattern was quite different.’29
As a group of senior Italian nutritionists wrote in 2009: ‘Every morning, most [Italian] adults just drink a cup of coffee or a cappuccino.’30
Yet as the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the CIA have all confirmed, the Italians live longer than either the British or the Americans.31 That doesn’t, of course, prove that breakfast is bad for you, but it does weaken the suggestion that good health is impossible without it.
Overview: When, in Tudor times, the European aristocracy ceased to skip breakfast, certain wise contemporaries expressed alarm. In 1542 the celebrated physician Andrew Boorde wrote in his Dietary of Health that ‘A labourer may eat three times a day but two meals a day are adequate for a rest man.’32
Why? Because, Boorde said, ‘repletion shortens a man’s life.’33 Equally, in his Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health of 1602,34 the scholar William Vaughan advised us to:
‘eat three meals a day until you come to the age of 40 years,’35
which was echoed by Sir John Harington (1560–1612):
‘feed only twice a day when you are at man’s age.’36
As we’ll discover, breakfast is dangerous because it is eaten when the body is most insulin-resistant, and, as we’ll also discover, the people who are most at risk of insulin-resistance are those who are over 45 years old and physically inactive. We might do worse than recapitulate the sixteenth-century wisdom of Dr Boorde and others.
Our best guide to breakfast may be Franz Kafka, who in his 1915 book Metamorphosis described how ‘for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day.’37 This description is often invoked by pro-breakfast scientists,38 but their confidence is misplaced because the full quote is: ‘The washing up from breakfast lay on the table; there was so much of it because, for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and he would stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers.’ Kafka is actually telling us that Gregor’s father is a jerk, who won’t work to support his family but who will nonetheless lash out at Gregor, the family breadwinner.
And with that image of breakfast as the meal of moral degenerates, I shall end this review of its history.