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

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СКАЧАТЬ pellagra, which is an unpleasant condition known for the four Ds: diarrhoea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Pellagra was once epidemic in the American south, and between 1905 and 1940 some 3 million people developed it, of whom about 100,000 died.³ Because niacin is found in meat, fish, eggs, fruit, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, fungi, beer and yeast extracts such as Marmite, pellagra is a disease of a very deficient diet, and the epidemic of the American south developed only because many of the inhabitants were so poor that they subsisted on a diet primarily of maize (corn) that had been ‘de-germed’ during its preparation. The de-germination removed the niacin from the cornmeal.^fn1

      Partly because the folk memory of the pellagra epidemic has not been lost, and partly because niacin is cheap, the manufacturers of breakfast cereal now boast of how much of it they add, voluntarily, to their products. But, actually, too much is added, and if children today consumed no niacin-fortified foods, only 2.9 per cent of them would consume less than the EAR (Estimated Average Requirement). But currently 28 per cent of American children aged 2 to 8 years old ingest more than the recommended UL (upper limit) – and 2.9 per cent of children consuming less than the EAR may represent less of a public health risk than 28 per cent of them consuming more than the UL.⁴

      Other cereal supplements, too, have caused concern. Some manufacturers fortify their products with iron, and in consequence some children consume toxic amounts of it. And in consequence of that, certain countries such as Norway now ban the fortification of breakfast cereals with iron. The authors of a recent study concluded that: ‘Obtaining recommended daily allowances (RDAs) and adequate intakes (AIs) from nonfortified food continues to have the advantage of (i) providing intakes of other potential nutrients and food components, and (ii) potentially enhancing intakes through simultaneous interactions with other nutrients.’⁵ Which in English says: ‘Eat natural, not artificial, food. Avoid breakfast cereals.’

      If breakfast cereals were replaced by unprocessed, more natural foods, children would be healthier: after all, the consumption of ready-to-eat cereals is predominantly an English-speaking phenomenon, and there is no systematic evidence that non-Anglophonic children suffer for not consuming them.

      The unhealthiness of breakfast cereals has long inspired humour, and in his 1975 novel Changing Places David Lodge wrote that the campus newspaper: ‘had recently reported an experiment in which rats fed on cornflake packets had proved healthier than rats fed on the cornflakes’.⁶

      And this humour is translating into consumer resistance: Euromonitor International, the marketing company, report that since 2012 breakfast cereal sales in countries such as the USA and UK have fallen by at least 1 per cent a year; and the decline is predicted to continue as consumers increasingly switch to yoghurt, fresh fruits and other protein-based, more natural, low-carbohydrate, low-sugar products.⁷

      The US Department of Agriculture continues to defend breakfast cereals as becoming ever healthier,⁸ but consumers are, rightly, resisting the corporate message.

       Breakfast cereals and Caucasians

      Breakfast cereals are a largely Anglophonic phenomenon in part because they are generally served with milk, and milk is a challenge to most non-Caucasian adults: whereas 90 per cent of northern Europeans can drink half a pint of milk without feeling sick, only 40 per cent of southern Europeans and only 35 per cent of the rest of the world can do so. Milk was intended by nature, of course, to be drunk only by infants, and it contains a sugar, lactose, that can normally be absorbed with comfort only by infants because only infant guts express an enzyme, lactase, by which to digest it. Most humans lose the lactase enzyme on leaving infancy but, around 6,500 years ago, Caucasians acquired a mutation by which adults retain it. Caucasians retain the lactase enzyme because, by helping them consume animal milk, which is rich in vitamin D, it helped pre-empt the rickets that bedevilled life in the sun-deprived north of Europe.⁹ It was at the same time, some 6,500 or so years ago, that Caucasians also acquired the mutations by which their skin turned white, the better to convert sunshine into vitamin D.

      Although lactase mutations have developed independently in certain other ethnic groups, particularly in those that herd sheep, goats and cattle, the adults of most ethnic groups (the Chinese, for example) remain milk-intolerant. Cheese and yoghurt, incidentally, are the products of bacterial fermentation, which breaks down much of the lactose, which is why those foods can be eaten by adults of all ethnic groups.¹⁰

      Globally, there is a good correlation between national rates of milk consumption and height: thus the Dutch and Scandinavians drink the most milk per capita¹¹ and they are among the tallest people in the world (the average Dutch man now stands at 6 feet 1 inch, 1.84 metres; average Dutch woman 5 feet 7 inches, 1.71 metres). Milk seems to be good for you: it’s the cereals they dunk that do the damage.

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       Myth No. 2: Breakfast is good for the brain

      Really? It is widely supposed that children and adolescents must do better at school, cognition-wise, if they eat breakfast, yet the conclusions of the most systematic reviews of the field are surprisingly tentative. So two comprehensive reviews of forty-five studies conducted between 1950 and 2008 concluded that eating breakfast seems to benefit the education only of children from deprived homes – and not necessarily because their brains need the morning calories but perhaps because children from deprived homes, on being lured to school by free food programmes, cannot then truant.¹

      If the evidence for breakfast benefiting the cognition of children is weak, it is even weaker for adults. In 1992 a study from the Department of Psychology, Cardiff University, Wales, found that, though breakfast seemed to improve adults’ morning ‘recognition memory’ and ‘logical reasoning’, it impaired their afternoon ‘semantic processing’.² In 1994 the Cardiff psychologists found that breakfast improved ‘free recall’ and ‘recognition memory’, had no effect on ‘semantic memory’, but impaired ‘logical reasoning’.³

      So eating breakfast seems to improve some aspects of brain function yet impair others, and the general lack of certainty over what – if anything – breakfast does systematically to brain function was revealed by a 2014 review of the fifteen most careful research papers in children and adults which concluded that: ‘There is insufficient quantity and consistency among studies to draw firm conclusions.’⁴

      But researchers need not be restricted to merely observing populations, they can also do experiments, and in 2014 a group from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, published a paper with the exciting title of ‘Always gamble on an empty stomach: hunger is associated with advantageous decision making’.⁵ Using the Iowa Gambling Task as a model for ‘complex decision tasks with uncertain outcomes’, the Utrecht team found that, when thirty university students skipped breakfast, they performed better in standard psychological tests that modelled decision-making and risk-taking. Leaders, the paper concluded, should skip breakfast.

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