We’re three-quarters of the way through the academic year and that means … Open Day! Time for me to roll out some of my greatest hits for prospective students (and their parents). That means talking about why commerce students report more psychopathic traits, what executed American criminals’ last meals can tell us about their psychology, and the aggression-related effects of skipping a meal.
Yes, in this last, I can show you that people who skip breakfast are more likely to put virtual pins into a virtual voodoo doll representing someone in their lives. It’s evolutionary, see. If you don’t have any food in the pantry you’re gonna have to go beat something to death, skin it, and eat it. I wanted to make a joke here about RFK Jr’s recent admission he put a dead bear cub in his van with exactly that plan in mind, but ended up dumping it in Central Park, made to look like a cycling accident.
Back to brekkie. While I wouldn’t advocate for calling breakfast, or any meal, the most important of the day, there are a number of specific benefits from breaking your fast in the morning. For example, we know that some people who skip breakfast eat more for their next meal: in part, this may be because our breakfastless brain becomes biased towards foods with high calorific value. That doughnut looks more enticing than the kale chips you were going to lunch on virtuously. (Incidentally, our daughter Gabrielle calls kale “angry lettuce”. Always makes me laugh.)
On average, though, skipping breakfast might make you more angry, but most people end up eating less per day across the two remaining meals than if they were eating three. Which is why it’s a bit of a paradox that weight gain is associated with missing your morning porridge.
If it’s not because you’re eating more (in fact, you’re probably eating less over the day) where does this come from? Actually, nutritional researchers aren’t sure. It could be less about missing breakfast than indirect factors that go with, for example, eating breakfast.
Maybe folk who eat an early meal also tend to follow lifestyles that mean lower bodyweight? For example, people who eat breakfast tend to be more physically active during the day, and that’s got to be good for our wellbeing. The state of being hangry looks a lot like a stress response. Physiological systems that aid fighting or fleeing are ramped up, and other less necessary systems are ramped down. Like our digestive system, for example.
Eating actually burns calories. It sets in motion a chain of biological processes involved in converting food into energy and storing that energy. Unfortunately for those of us who like the idea of eating ourselves thin, this diet-induced thermogenesis applies to only about one-tenth of the food we consume.
A July paper in BMC Nutrition emphasises, also, that there are benefits to eating breakfast beyond being more active and weighing less. The study, led by José Francisco López-Gil, describes analysis of data from more than 150,000 adolescents in 42 countries. The young participants were asked how often they typically ate breakfast, where breakfast was defined as “more than a glass of milk or fruit juice”.
Horrifyingly – to me anyway – about 40% of these young people said they didn’t eat breakfast at all. Participants were also asked how satisfied they were with their lives, on a visual “ladder” scale. On average, participants tended to indicate at least some life satisfaction, but the most satisfied were, you guessed it, our regular breakfast eaters.
Breakfast missers reported the least life satisfaction, just above the “meh” point on the scale. The authors speculate that this is just another example of a well-established finding that adolescents who skip meals tend to report lower mood and more physical health issues.
Interestingly, about 15% of Death Row inmates refuse a last meal.
