The Truth About Breakfast

Breakfast is the meal that we’re constantly told that we must eat. Supposedly, we should eat breakfast like a king in order to be lean and healthy — although the absurdity of eating more food in order to lose weight doesn’t seem to dawn on these geniuses.

There’s nothing wrong with breakfast — just like there’s nothing wrong with no breakfast.

What matters much more is what we eat for breakfast.

Unfortunately, Americans most often eat breakfast cereal and other sugar-laden and high-carbohydrate food, like muffins, sugar-sweetened yogurt, donuts, bagels, juice.

It’s no wonder that so many people are overweight or obese. Breakfast is a big part of the problem.

Breakfast cereal and other high-carbohydrate food that Americans eat in the morning

• spikes blood sugar
• spikes insulin
• leads to eating more later
• perfect recipe for acne
• makes people fat
• low in protein -> muscle loss

Breakfast Candy

Many breakfast foods are more aptly characterized as breakfast candy.

Check out the following illustration (from here) on the amount of sugar in some typical breakfast foods:

Any food like this will spike your blood sugar. What happens next is that your blood sugar crashes from the rise in insulin, and you either have a hypoglycemic episode and/or become ravenously hungry by mid-morning and then eat more. I used to have hypoglycemic crashes all the time and thought they were normal; not to get too far ahead of myself, but when I switched to a low-carbohydrate, unprocessed diet, they immediately stopped.

Even if you don’t eat food with added sugar, don’t think you’ll steer clear of this. A bagel, for instance, has about 300 calories and 56 grams of carbohydrate. Refined carbs like flour should be known as “sugar in waiting”, since they turn to glucose when digested, with very nearly the same effects on blood sugar and insulin as sugar.

When men ate a bagel for breakfast and their food intake was tracked over the next 24 hours, they ate ~400 calories more than people who ate eggs for breakfast.1

When women ate a bagel for breakfast and were later given a buffet lunch, they ate 160 more calories at lunch than those who ate eggs.2

There are a large number of studies showing the same thing, that eating a large amount of refined carbohydrates for breakfast means more hunger later. To lose weight, ditch the cereal.

Continually spiking blood sugar and insulin by eating breakfast cereal, bagels, or other high-carb or sugary food leads to insulin resistance, which in turn can lead to Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and premature aging. To quote Dr. Georgia Ede, “Simply put, refined carbohydrates cause brain damage.”

The perfect recipe for acne

I recently wrote about acne, what causes it, and how to get rid of it. In brief, it’s all about the food, in particular, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and milk.

Some teenagers practically live on bowls of sugar-sweetened cereal, and acne is rife among them. Breakfast cereal is a perfect recipe for acne. Ditch the cereal for a great improvement in your skin.

Eggs: a healthy breakfast

The medical and nutritional establishment has demonized eggs for decades as an unhealthy food that causes heart disease.

They were wrong.

Eggs are about as close to a perfect food as you can get, loaded with protein and healthy fat. They are low in carbohydrates and therefore do not spike blood sugar or insulin.

The studies on bagels for breakfast cited above used eggs as a comparison group — those eating eggs ate hundreds of calories less during the subsequent 24 hours.

Eggs for breakfast enhances weight loss, with those doing so losing 65% more weight than those eating bagels.3

In fact, other than eating fewer carbohydrates, my number one tip for weight loss is to eat eggs for dinner too. Verified by me personally. Eggs fill you up much more than just about any food.

If you must have a snack, hard-boiled eggs are the way to go. Eat one or two and you’ll find yourself skipping the next meal.

So ditch the breakfast cereal, the bagels and donuts, the smoothies, and eat eggs instead.

Coffee for breakfast

Coffee is one of the healthiest things you can drink. Coffee is associated with lower death rates.

Coffee improves insulin sensitivity and promotes autophagy, the cellular self-cleansing process that rids cells of junk and that’s vitally important to slowing aging.

Coffee is loaded with polyphenols.

In reality, coffee is just a liquid form of fruits and vegetables, since it’s made from a plant.

So have coffee with your eggs for breakfast too, and you’ll be streets ahead in health compared to those other people eating sugar and refined carbs.

Coffee makes a great breakfast all on its own as well. I often have nothing but a cup of coffee when I get up, and maybe another cup at mid-morning, and don’t eat until noon.

Coffee is the great enabler of intermittent fasting. It decreases hunger and raises energy levels.

Is breakfast really that important?

We’ve been bombarded with propaganda to the effect that we must eat when we get up in the morning.

Consider that most of the research showing that breakfast is important has been sponsored by Kellogg’s and other food manufacturers. That fact casts considerable doubt on the validity of breakfast being important.

Breakfast foods are hugely profitable. Food companies put cheap refined carbohydrates and sugar into a box with a picture on it and sell it for top dollar. Of course they want everyone eating their food for breakfast.

People who regularly skip breakfast have lower medical claims than those who eat breakfast.4 See the following chart.

Since eating typical breakfast food spikes blood glucose and insulin and makes people eat more later, it’s hard to see how eating breakfast can be so important or healthy.

In reality, many people (like myself) are not very hungry in the morning. Forcing yourself to eat when you don’t feel like it isn’t a good idea for your waistline or your health.

Conclusion

Ditch the breakfast cereal, bagels, donuts, granola bars, and other high-carbohydrate, sugar-laden food for breakfast.

Skip the breakfast foods they want you to eat and see a big improvement in your waistline and your health.

If you’re hungry, eat eggs — have some bacon with it too. Coffee is a healthy addition.

Or if you’re not hungry, drink a cup of coffee, and that’s your breakfast.

Breakfast is not necessary. But if you want it, it’s perfectly fine, so long as you don’t eat the garbage that the food companies are peddling.

PS: Besides changing your breakfast habits, try the most healthful exercise there is, as discussed in my book, Muscle Up.

PPS: Subscribe to my newsletter and get my book, Top Ten Reasons We’re Fat, for free.