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

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СКАЧАТЬ influence directly on the reproductive organs. They increase the local supply of blood; and through nervous sympathy with the brain, the passions are aroused.’¹⁷ But cornflakes would leave a person energetically deprived.¹⁸

      Although he never explicitly marketed cornflakes as an energy-depleting anti-masturbatory tool, John Kellogg nonetheless conceived breakfast cereals – which are now sold as nutritionally valuable – to be nutritionally poor. The history of breakfast is littered with these ironies because, until recently, opinions emerged out of beliefs, not out of empirical evidence.

      John was an intellectual who took ideas seriously. His views on masturbation were then orthodox, as were his views on eugenics (he was in favour) and constipation (he was against), but his brother, Will, was not an intellectual and – to promote their palatability – he put sugar into cornflakes, which John opposed. John lost that fight but it was sincerely fought.

      One of their contemporaries, Dr Dewey of Meadville, Pennsylvania, went even further, and in his 1900 book The No-Breakfast Plan and the Fasting Cure he advocated skipping breakfast altogether: Dewey wrote that patients who skipped breakfast seemed to make better and faster cures from illnesses than did breakfast eaters.

      The revival of breakfast: By the 1920s Dr Dewey seemed to be winning the argument: breakfast in America was apparently declining into little more than a snack. This was a concern to the Beech-Nut Packing Company, which was raising lots of pigs but which was finding too few buyers for its bacon, and it therefore commissioned Edward Bernays to rescue its market.

      Bernays, one of the fathers of PR, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose techniques he exploited on behalf of powerful clients, which included American Tobacco (for whom he helped break the taboo against women smoking in public) and the United Fruit Company (for whom he helped engineer the coup that removed the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman). Bernays, famously, influenced Goebbels, which is no surprise since in his 1928 book Propaganda he’d written:

      The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.¹⁹

      One opinion of the masses that Bernays resolved to manipulate was their commitment to a ‘very light breakfast of coffee, with maybe a roll and orange juice’, which he sought to replace ‘with a heavy breakfast’; and in a film (still available as a video on the web)²⁰ Bernays explained how he mobilised 4,500 doctors to publicly support Beech-Nut’s faith in heavy breakfasts.^fn2 In the words of Dr Kaori O’Connor, a social anthropologist at University College London and the author of the 2013 book The English Breakfast: The Biography of an English Meal: ‘the idea that [breakfast] is healthy in its own right was laid on a plate for us by marketing companies. And, by and large, we’ve gobbled it up.’²¹

      The breakfast mantras: It was in 1847, in the fourth edition of his Treatise on Diet and Regimen, that Dr William Robertson, who practised medicine in Buxton, Derbyshire, UK, wrote that ‘Breakfast should always be an important, if not the most important, meal of the day.’²² As I have already noted, Dr Robertson was a prominent physician, so it behoves us to ask: what research led him to coin that momentous phrase? Which careful observations, which controlled experiments, underpinned that weighty idiom? Well, this is what he wrote: ‘Breakfast is very properly made to consist of a considerable proportion of liquids, to supply the loss of the fluids of the body during the hours of sleep.’

      Eh? It is true we lose water through our lungs and sweat glands as we sleep, but why was Dr Robertson so fixated on that? Well, Dr Robertson was a water physician: he practised in Buxton, which was a spa town whose waters were believed to cure myriad diseases, so of course Dr Robertson believed that water lay at the heart of health and illness. But that belief – which is barely more advanced than Hippocrates’ belief in the four humours – is an absurdity. Yet Dr Robertson was no one-trick pony, and he also believed that ‘the nervous system is restored by sleep to its fullest power and activity,’ and that we should therefore eat early ‘before the nervous system has become expended by its mental and physical labours’, which is a further absurdity.

      The other great breakfast mantra is, of course, Adelle Davis’s injunction to ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.’²³ Adelle Davis (1904–74) was the most popular nutritionist in America of her day, and though she was a controversial figure who was regularly accused of misusing science to promote dietary fads, she sold over 10 million copies of books with titles such as Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954). As to her famous mantra, let us ask: what was the thinking behind it? Did it emerge from the systematic scientific study of a problem that is still urgent today, or did it emerge out of a health scare that has since been discredited?

      Post-war, America went through a strange panic over low blood sugar levels, and a charity called the Hypoglycemia Foundation claimed that ‘There is probably no illness today which causes so much widespread suffering, so much inefficiency and loss of time, so many accidents, so many family breakups and so many suicides as hypoglycemia.’²⁴

      The media followed suit, and a magazine such as Family Circle could in June 1965 assert that ‘millions among us … suffer unknowingly from low blood sugar’ while Town and Country could state in June 1971 that ‘ten million Americans have hypoglycaemia.’ Respected professionals fed the national anxiety, and a psychiatrist wrote that

      ‘about half of the people I see for psychiatric problems have abnormal blood sugar … the incidence in schizophrenia is high and in neuroses even higher.’²⁵

      Adelle Davis herself asserted that ‘irritability resulting from low blood sugar can be a factor in divorces.’²⁶

      It is rare for a bizarre new idea to emerge without someone, somewhere, profiting from it, and it appears that the hypoglycaemia scare coincided with the discovery that adrenal extracts – which were expensive and therefore profitable to administer – could ‘cure’ hypoglycaemia; but the respectable authorities rallied against the charlatans, and in 1973 the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Endocrine Society published a joint statement saying that few Americans suffer from low blood sugar levels, which in any case were not dangerous:

       Statement on Hypoglycemia

      Recent publicity in the popular press has led the public to believe that the occurrence of hypoglycemia is high in this country and that many of the symptoms that affect the American population are not recognised as being caused by this condition. These claims are not supported by the medical evidence.²⁷

      Adelle Davis, therefore, coined her great aphorism to address a non-problem: she knew that the blood sugar levels of breakfast skippers fell gently during the mornings,²⁸ and since raised blood sugar levels are one of the great killers of our time, so the same data that inspired Davis’s mantra should now inspire its revision: Eat breakfast like a pauper.

      We see, therefore, that the two popular breakfast mantras were coined to address the non-problems of night-time dehydration, night-time starvation, brain fatigue and rampant hypoglycaemia, yet those mantras remain so potent that many people today believe they have a metabolic duty to eat breakfast. In a world where millions of people overeat, their pushing themselves to eat a meal they might otherwise skip is not a trivial matter.

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