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Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing
Terence Kealey
Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but only if we skip it.Since Victorian times, we have been told to breakfast like kings and dine like paupers. In the wake of his own type 2 diabetes diagnosis, Professor Terence Kealey was given the same advice. He soon noticed that his glucose levels were unusually high after eating first thing in the morning. But if he continued to fast until lunchtime they fell to a normal level. Professor Kealey began to question how much evidence there was to support the advice he’d been given, and whether there might be an advantage for some to not eating breakfast after all.Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal asks:• What is the reliable scientific and medical evidence for eating breakfast?• Why do people suppose that eating breakfast reduces the total amount of food they consume over the day, when the opposite is true?• Who should consider intermittent fasting by removing breakfast from their daily routine?• From weight loss to reduced blood pressure, what are the potential benefits of missing breakfast?
Copyright (#ulink_3a189982-3a1c-55a7-93aa-1f5e0f6dcd33)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © Terence Kealey 2016
Diagrams redrawn by Martin Brown
Cover image © Keenan
The right of Terence Kealey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It should be used to supplement rather than replace the advice of your doctor or another trained health professional. If you know or suspect you have a health problem, it is recommended that you seek your GP’s advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. This publisher and the author accept no liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008172367
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008172350
Version: 2017-04-27
Dedication (#ulink_9dcb3f3e-134f-59e2-8207-09716c9febd3)
To my wife, Sally
Contents
Cover (#ud9b8caf8-6110-5e86-a2c6-09b5e4275c12)
Title Page (#u611cb6cc-022c-50b7-a47c-5716001f9a67)
Copyright (#ud4a5e575-1681-5578-ad2c-aeeb81bce980)
Dedication (#u03220c53-35da-562a-a0a7-503e0d30d42f)
Prologue (#u200336e1-a8f4-5d22-be00-e28025538103)
Preface (#udb4f53e6-06e3-517a-8877-ab86067e0c36)
PART ONE: My Story, Episode (#uefa6163c-a115-5398-be58-836e71cb6492)
1. My diagnosis (#ua5ad5fac-4381-577c-ab56-08711a0e4890)
PART TWO: The Dubious Advocates of Breakfast (#u165a70e5-467d-51cb-97e2-bd526ea99a0b)
2. The glorification of breakfast (#uf404c116-191f-5e1d-8468-38833da76d51)
3. Breakfast in an age of commercial science (#ue5c8604c-2618-5510-b233-45228810ba04)
PART THREE: Breakfast Myths (#u835ed279-5fbf-51f0-b4ff-7245fcffc6f2)
4. Myth No. 1: Breakfast cereals are healthy (#u9eeb96f4-264f-5fbe-9027-ff8c7950b6f0)
5. Myth No. 2: Breakfast is good for the brain (#u188faebf-ca2f-59fb-8cc9-f1dd7f7fab83)
6. Myth No. 3: Breakfast is slimming (#u51ad44fd-70fa-5ff3-8a39-ca88f1283abb)
PART FOUR: The Breakfast Paradox (#u51e78326-8f4f-5546-8c05-af9bea6e2f2a)
7. Yo-yo dieting (#ufd5fc5f0-03d0-5008-a68f-ab8c3d85d8b4)
8. Chaotic lives (#u0a76774b-d6aa-5c67-979b-cc17a16d1d53)
9. Five breakfast sagas (#u46f83739-0f30-5380-9dd3-113265409934)
PART FIVE: Breakfast Wars (#u7ecbe691-20a1-5b2a-b6f9-3401522b7709)
10. The Harvard and Cambridge challenges (#ucb09ce29-1df2-522c-8be4-fd19321f3783)
11. The heroic breakfast guerrillas (#ua7b14ce5-d0ed-538c-96fa-c36e2bfc389c)
PART SIX: Misleading Experiments (#u446188c9-6ec4-525a-b9c0-18bb45e54351)
12. Blood glucose and breakfast: the unhealthy majority (#u5e19dcd7-ab2f-56ed-b60c-bb1219f2fb8b)
13. Blood glucose and breakfast: the healthy minority (#u0fefc6cb-0647-5156-ade0-b57ba88f69fe)
14. Why have the scientists claimed breakfast to be safe? (#u6b0a048a-d03e-58e4-8ff2-dac4d549e91f)
PART SEVEN: How Breakfast Kills Us (#u1a26f22f-eae1-5213-897e-4cf8daa4636b)
15. The fat saga (#uf354142b-a5a7-5b62-b1db-ff94138762ce)
PART EIGHT: Insulin, the Great Traitor (#u4ac6df02-4739-54bc-a8ef-c6584b6ffeee)
16. The carbohydratisation of the English-speaking breakfast (#ue8f942a9-afb6-51ab-b7e1-d027f6a46af2)
17. Nothing about breakfast makes sense except in the light of insulin (#ubb497d5d-88fc-5506-8545-dd19c525f599)
18. Diabesity, the big new disease (#u56c80978-b59a-5e07-a44b-cf16261ab483)
19. Insulin-resistance, the modern plague (#uff276769-3e1a-56ca-adb8-6f0c63198123)
20. Definitions (#u6b790b5d-f190-5a1e-b675-a7e529babea6)
21. The dawn phenomenon (#u948cf7a7-fb81-5751-a1c9-8b6fa2ace81d)
22. The biochemists have been warning us for nearly a century that breakfast is dangerous (#u93a2e900-d2e6-53bd-b531-031164892846)
PART NINE: Skipping Breakfast: Personal Stories (#u98c52706-8b8b-5e0a-9665-654c51e35aa8)
23. My story, episode 2 (#ud47274f2-7f3b-5806-a816-59816e87861d)
PART TEN: How Insulin Kills Us (#u2b459816-5137-5315-8ff9-20957902f0f7)
24. What a modern plague looks like: the metabolic syndrome (#ub4fb7e21-b74a-594a-b3c5-f72d2278e089)
25. Can we reverse the metabolic syndrome? (#u980812f0-bff7-58ab-98ff-66bc510146b5)
26. The new fasting diets (#u7f9d1a66-91fe-5110-8ada-b5735d7b10e1)
27. Type 3 diabetes (and other consequences of the metabolic syndrome) (#u39a88bc0-a6bc-5a11-b912-2e461aa8e634)
PART ELEVEN: If You Must Eat Breakfast, What Must You Eat? (#u592c2833-7479-5736-aca5-4036474bdf1b)
28. So, what to eat? (#ue2ce8bd7-8724-5372-80b2-c45c02be915b)
29. And if you must eat breakfast? (#u27361261-cd95-55dd-b859-a1a74f6914cc)
Envoi (#u25346857-6ced-5281-a48b-b9b7a538835d)
Afterword (#u5e40c05a-4caf-529e-8832-6e6a73b1ca2c)
Footnotes (#ub099f12d-c927-57e8-a3d9-819a37899205)
References (#ueddd4c63-0784-5730-a748-dcfec3380604)
Illustration Credits (#uc9ec3a41-6179-5f2a-a9cc-8e1e058d02d0)
Index (#u13024f3b-2e4c-5c9c-987d-7ef1a459e772)
Acknowledgements (#uc08789f9-ef76-534c-a24f-fe5d70490e7c)
About the Author (#u67629484-d94f-57cd-a20b-fd30c3f679fb)
About the Publisher (#u775fcbe0-b1fe-55dd-8cbd-5b12e4b37f69)
Prologue (#ulink_168b2e14-04f1-5b83-be19-361fdc846825)
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).
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.
Preface (#ulink_24327e00-e3f7-5dde-a983-41ea34643d74)
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.
PART ONE (#ulink_1f6c55fd-d24d-598e-b4ef-d417986dca95)
My Story, Episode 1 (#ulink_1f6c55fd-d24d-598e-b4ef-d417986dca95)
1 (#ulink_6c8258ef-3749-56c4-a521-f3585e3b8d02)
My diagnosis (#ulink_6c8258ef-3749-56c4-a521-f3585e3b8d02)
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 my doctor what was happening and, echoing my wife, he said it sounded a bit like diabetes. I was forced to agree. So he performed a spot urine test, and there it was – glucose in my urine (‘sugar in the water,’ as he put it). I was diabetic. He then sent a blood sample to the lab, which shortly revealed a fasting blood glucose level of 19.3 mmol/l (normal range 3.9 to 5.5) and an HbA1c of 13.3 per cent (normal range 4 to 5.9; see later). I was very diabetic indeed. Type 2.
My story should thereafter have been routine. Thanks to a good wife and a good doctor a correct diagnosis had been made, and I was surely on the road to recovery. But I was then told to eat breakfast.
The authorities: Diabetes UK is the major diabetic charity in Britain. It was founded in 1934 as the Diabetic Association by H.G. Wells, the author, and by Dr R.D. Lawrence, a prominent physician, both of whom were diabetic. In 2013 its membership exceeded 300,000 people and its income was £38.8 million.
