Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing. Terence Kealey

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      But just as it seemed that breakfast had been confirmed to be dangerous in type 2 diabetes and its associated conditions, two studies were published in 2015 apparently showing the opposite. They were published jointly by Professors Daniela Jakubowicz (Tel Aviv University) and Oren Froy (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The message of their first paper⁷ was reported, accurately, on 25 February 2015 by The Times in its headline: ‘Diabetics better off with high-energy breakfast’.

      That was a startling message yet, oddly, the study does not show breakfast to be a safe meal. In fact, its breakfast findings are indistinguishable from Professor Christiansen’s. So, on studying eighteen middle-aged type 2 diabetics, Professors Jakubowicz and Froy found that, like Professor Christiansen’s patients, they woke in the mornings with high blood glucose levels, at around 7 mmol/l, and that when they ate a breakfast of 700 calories, their blood glucose levels rose even higher than Professor Christiansen’s. So Professors Jakubowicz and Froy had actually confirmed that, for type 2 diabetics, breakfast is a dangerous meal. So how did their paper turn into a story of breakfast safety?

      Well, let’s look at their other 2015 paper,⁸ whose message was accurately summarised by Tel Aviv University on its website: ‘Diabetics who skip breakfast provoke hazardous blood sugar spikes.’⁹ The website continued:

      The clinical study was conducted on 22 type-2 diabetics who averaged 56.0 years old, with a mean Body Mass Index of 28.2 kg/m² [i.e. they were overweight]. Over the course of two days, the participants consumed precisely the same numbers of calories and the same balanced meal – milk, tuna, bread, and a chocolate breakfast bar – for lunch and dinner. The only difference was that one day they ate breakfast and the second day they fasted until lunch. ‘We theorized that the omission of breakfast would not be healthy, but it was surprising to see the high degree of deterioration of glucose metabolism only because the participants did not eat breakfast,’ said Prof. Jakubowicz. The researchers found that participants experienced extraordinary glucose peaks of 268mg/dl (14.8 mmol/l) after lunch and 298mg/dl (16.5 mmol/l) after dinner on days they skipped breakfast, versus only 192 mg/dl (10.6 mmol/l), and 215 mg/dl (11.9 mmol/l) after eating an identical lunch and dinner on days they ate breakfast.

      That looks pretty damning of skipping breakfast, but there are three points about the professors’ own university website report that are wrong. First, the figures are incorrect. Actually, the participants’ glucose peaks at dinner on the days they ate breakfast were 236, not 215 mg/dl, so the differences between the breakfast-skipping and breakfast-eating days were not so extraordinary (298 against 236). Less grievously, but still odd, the website also reported the figure for the breakfast-skipping dinners incorrectly (298 v 294 mg/dl).

      Second, the website said that the experiments were performed ‘over the course of two days’ but, actually, they were performed over the course of six days. This is important because of the third error, which was contained within the quote from Professor Jakubowicz: ‘it was surprising to see the high degree of deterioration of glucose metabolism only because the participants did not eat breakfast [my italics].’ But that wasn’t the only change. In fact, when the patients were skipping breakfast they were on the third day of a weight-loss regime, whereas when they were eating breakfast they were not: unlike Professor Christiansen, Professors Jakubowicz and Froy had not compensated for the breakfasts their patients missed (i.e. they did not increase their food at lunch and dinner) so when they got their patients to skip breakfast they were also putting them on weight-loss diets – reducing their intake from 2,100 to 1,400 calories a day – and measuring the differences only on the third day.