We all have heard so many “facts” about breakfast especially when it comes to healthy eating that we can’t be sure which is true and which is false. Here are 6 of the most popular breakfast facts that are totally false:
Myth 1: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Your mom was right about many things, but this isn’t necessarily one of them. Breakfast is only the Most Important Meal if it’s your only healthy meal of the day (thank you, Greek yogurt), or if you regularly overdo it on pancakes and waffles and muffins and more, which could ultimately impact your health.
Myth 2: Breakfast makes you smarter. Studies do show that when schools serve breakfast, children do better academically. But most of the evidence suggests that hungry kids who may not have access to food at home benefit the most. So in theory, the whole breakfast-makes-you-do-better-on-tests thing could be a bunch of bull and the truth is that kids perform better when they’re not distracted by hunger, no matter what time of day they eat. Also, the jury is out on whether breakfast benefits the adult brain — there’s not a ton of research on the topic.
We all have heard so many “facts” about breakfast especially when it comes to healthy eating that we can’t be sure which is true and which is false. Here are 6 of the most popular breakfast facts that are totally false:
Myth 1: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Your mom was right about many things, but this isn’t necessarily one of them. Breakfast is only the Most Important Meal if it’s your only healthy meal of the day (thank you, Greek yogurt), or if you regularly overdo it on pancakes and waffles and muffins and more, which could ultimately impact your health.
Myth 2: Breakfast makes you smarter. Studies do show that when schools serve breakfast, children do better academically. But most of the evidence suggests that hungry kids who may not have access to food at home benefit the most. So in theory, the whole breakfast-makes-you-do-better-on-tests thing could be a bunch of bull and the truth is that kids perform better when they’re not distracted by hunger, no matter what time of day they eat. Also, the jury is out on whether breakfast benefits the adult brain — there’s not a ton of research on the topic.
Myth 3: Eating breakfast fends off hunger. If you skip it, you’ll house anything and everything for lunch. Not necessarily. In the new Cornell study, study subjects either ate no breakfast, a high-carb 335-calorie breakfast, or a high-fiber 360-calorie breakfast. Yes, the breakfast skippers were the hungriest at lunchtime, but they didn’t eat more calories than those in the other breakfast groups, and ended up eating fewer calories throughout the day.
Myth 4: You can lose weight just by eating breakfast. Wrong again. In a small, 12-week Vanderbilt University study, researchers tracked the weight loss of 52 overweight women on different but calorically equal weight-loss programs designed to change up their breakfast-eating habits. Habitual breakfast eaters who skipped breakfast during the study lost slightly more weight than people who normally skipped breakfast and started eating it for the study. In the overall results, breakfast-eating habits didn’t play a major role in weight loss or gain.
Myth 5: Breakfast = morning food coma. Actually, breakfast can give you more energy: In a six-week University of Bath study that assigned two groups of lean adults to either eat breakfast or fast until noon and then tracked their activity levels, researchers found that breakfast eaters naturally moved around more than those who skipped breakfast. The extra activity helped breakfast eaters burn almost 500 more calories than breakfast skippers, who were generally more sluggish.
Myth 6: Breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism so you burn more calories all day. Wouldn’t that be nice? The fact is, breakfast doesn’t significantly increase your resting metabolic rate (aka the speed at which your body burns calories). The Bath study also found that breakfast eaters burned about 11 more calories per day. Which is basically nothing, considering an average, moderately active woman in her 20s eats about 2,000 to 2,200 calories per day.
