Fact or fiction: can you skip your breakfast?

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: skip breakfast?

Breakfast is good and healthy, you must have breakfast, otherwise you'll be buying Snickers at the gas station around eleven o'clock and before you know it, your jeans won't fit anymore. Although, this professor says it's really not a disaster to skip breakfast or to have a little Italian breakfast.

‘It is important to have breakfast because it provides new energy after the night and gets the digestion going,’ advises the Nutrition Center. Which breakfast do they mean? In Great Britain, they start the day with sausage, baked beans, bacon, mushrooms, and tomato, in Asia breakfast is often a spicy rice dish, and the average Italian has breakfast with a cappuccino and a cigarette. It doesn't matter at all, writes professor Tim Spector in his book Ingelepeld. He compared a whole stack of studies on the health benefits of breakfast. His conclusion: you might as well skip your breakfast.

Delusion
That cornflakes being healthy is, according to the professor, a delusion. ‘They have a high glycemic index, even higher than that of potatoes, and consist mainly of starch.’ But the breakfast cereal business is booming, with profit margins of over 40 percent (and thus a hefty advertising budget). And it’s probably because of that commerce that we think breakfast is very important.

Losing weight!
In general, it is claimed that you get very hungry if you skip breakfast, so you end up eating a lot and the pounds pile on. Nonsense, according to the professor. ‘There is no evidence for the claim that skipping meals leads to faster weight gain or that it has a negative impact on your metabolism,’ he writes. ‘Many studies have shown that skipping breakfast can actually be a useful strategy for losing weight.’

Happy microbiome
Spector is a fan of skipping meals anyway, and so are his intestines. Because short fasting is good for healthy intestines, he writes. ‘Long periods without food are not good for the microbiome (in the intestines, ed.) but it may benefit from short periods of fasting, for example by skipping breakfast. After a period of four to six hours without food, some types start to divide and feed on the carbohydrates in the mucus layer of the intestinal wall, cleaning the intestinal wall and making that intestinal barrier more efficient and healthier.

Frying eggs
His conclusion: experiment yourself. Can't get a bite down in the morning? No panic, there's nothing wrong with that. And if you feel good with fried eggs and bacon, then enjoy that. Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Nonsense.