You know this person; the health nut that eats
a healthy, hearty breakfast every morning to boost their day, then freaks out
when that clock hits 8pm. Once that digital clock throws up 20:00 they shut
their mouth and refuse to swallow any morsel of food for fear of it going
straight to the hips. Fear not, my friends, for this myth is about to get well
and truly blown away.
The hypothesis goes that, as your
metabolism is quicker and you are more active during the day, your body will
just burn all of the breakfast off and you won’t gain any fat. Then, metabolism
slows down during the night and you become less active, any food you eat is not
going to be used up as readily. So this surplus of energy is going to be
shuttled away to your fat stores rather than burned. Is there any truth to
this? To a certain extent, yes. Does this make you fat? No, and I will explain
why. But first, let’s look at how the myth started in the first place.
Ghost and ghoulies may come out at night,
but eating after 8pm doesn't have to be a horror story
Building a lie
The myth started after a study done on
breakfast eaters. There was a correlation between whether someone eats
breakfast and their weight, with the breakfast eaters being lower bodyweights
in general. On top of this, rat studies showed that if they skipped meals and
made up for it later, they would end up fatter than if they had not skipped
breakfast. To add even more weight (pun intended) to their argument, a human study showed
that, when dieting, those who ate most of their food at breakfast lost the most
weight, the late night eaters ended up losing less weight.
All of this ‘evidence’, to the untrained
eye, adds up to the idea that breakfast is a must, and eating a single grain of
rice after 8pm will send you into obesity quicker than the nutty professor when
his potion wears off. But it is all a big fat lie. It is perpetuated by the
health industry through magazines and articles, mainly because they have
nothing interesting to write about, as good nutrition is actually relatively
simple in nature and doesn’t have to be complicated. But complication sells,
and so do breakfast cereals when they jump on the bandwagon and push their
sales through advertising and brainwashing us into the ‘benefits of breakfast’.
The rise in sales of breakfast bars/granola bars is testament to the fear
people have of missing breakfast. And when I tell people that I am a
nutritionist yet I don’t eat breakfast, I wish I had a camera to record some of
the shocked faces I see. I might as well have slaughtered a baby bunny rabbit
in front of them with a chainsaw.
Time to destroy this myth once and for all.
The rat study
Rats who skip breakfast and make up for it
later on at night end up fatter than the ones which spread that same food over
the course of the day. True enough. We, on the other hands, are not rats
(shocking, I know).
Human and rat metabolisms are, surprisingly, different.
The metabolism of a rat is much much
quicker and more sensitive to food patterns; this tends to be common with
smaller animals. Rats have a shorter lifespan. So, relatively, a day in the
life of a rat can be equivalent to a week or month for humans. So, when a rat
skips a meal, it is the equivalent of us going without food for a week. As a
survival mechanism, the metabolism will slow down in order to preserve energy
stores. When the rat eats again, energy in does not match energy out (due to
the lower metabolic rate) and so the rat gains more fat with the same energy.
But wait, a human has a different
metabolism. Sure, in absence of energy, our metabolisms slow down too. But how
long do we have to go without food before this happens? One hour? Three? Ten?
I have seen studies (Zauner et al, 2000 and Mansell et al, 1990) which
show humans can go 48 hours without any food before we see a decline in
metabolic rate. In fact, some studies show a small increase in energy
expenditure initially, whilst the body releases hormones such as norepenephrine
and noraderenaline, the ones which basically make you want to go out and hunt
something to eat. So skipping breakfast is NOT going to send your metabolism to
a grinding halt.
Breakfast study
But what about the correlation between
skipping breakfast and higher body weights?
Correlation does not equal causation
This above sentence is, in my opinion, one
of the most important concepts in the world to understand. It allows you to see
‘evidence’ from a different light, and apply more logical conclusions – and
also allows you to be more cautious in jumping to conclusions from new studies.
Read it, and make sure you understand it.
There could be a number of reasons why
breakfast eaters tended to weigh less. People who are into health have generally
been brainwashed into the idea of ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the
day’. As a result, people who tend to exercise, be more aware of calories, eat
healthier foods and have more of a vested interest in how they look will also
eat breakfast. It is more likely that it is these other things which make them
weigh less, and it has nothing to do with the fact they eat breakfast.
If we were to tell people that drinking
your own urine makes you weigh less and be healthier (bare with me here) then
there would, once word gets out, be a very clear correlation between body
weight and urine drinking. Why? Because only the most die-hard health nuts who
are obsessed with their body weights would do it. As a result, in a survey of
people who drink/do not drink their own urine, there would be a higher number
of people with lower bodyweights who do partake in this bizarre act. Yet, it is
quite obvious that it is not the urine drinking which has caused the lower
bodyweights.
On the flip side, there could be a number
of reasons for why heavier people tended to ‘not’ eat breakfast. I put the word
‘not’ in inverted commas because it is likely that a lot of obese people, in an
attempt to cover up the amount of food they eat, would report that they don’t
eat breakfast. They may even forget that coffee with ten sugars and 500
calories of creamer (and the donut to accompany it) that they grab from the gas
station on the way to work. On top of that, these breakfast skippers may make
up for it in the night by eating more calories than they should. It is the fact
they are eating more calories as a total which makes them gain weight, not when
they eat the calories. Also, breakfast skippers tend to not care so much about
their health (if they did, they probably would have bought into the myth that
eating breakfast is healthy), so they will probably fill their day with poor
food choices. It is not that these poor food choices are the cause of the
obesity, but more that they are easy to eat more of (and THIS is what makes
them gain weight).
On top of this, this was data which relies
on the self reporting of people’s food intakes. People are notoriously poor at
remembering how much and how often and when they ate. Most people can easily
misjudge the amount of calories in food by under/overestimating by 100%. I have
regularly seen people who claim to only eat 2000 calories a day – and then
watch them scoff down 3,000 before dinner. So self reported intakes are poor at
best.
And the dieters?
This one is my favourite. This study showed
that when two groups of dieters with the same calorie allowance were split into
two groups (those who ate the majority of their food at night, and those who
ate the majority of food at breakfast), the breakfast eaters lost more weight.
However, when you actually look past the abstract of the study and delve into
the article, you see that there is something very interesting.
The reason why the late night eaters lost
less weight is because they lost less lean body mass. As we know, muscle tissue
weighs more than fat tissue (for the amount of energy in that tissue). So we
actually see a phenomenon where the late night eaters lost MORE BODY FAT, yet
weighed more at the end of the study because they had retained more muscle.
This may be important because lean body mass preservation is vital if you want
a toned look, and may also help with maintenance of metabolism in the long run.
So we can see that, contrary to the myth that late night eating is detrimental
to body composition, it may actually serve a BENEFIT.
Put that in your breakfast eating pipes and
smoke it.
This could be down to improved nutrient
partitioning through heightened anabolic processes occurring at night, although
that is pure speculation on my behalf. There is now a small subset of fitness
enthusiasts who are aware of this above fact and practice something called
‘carb-backloading’ where they eat the majority of their carbohydrates in the
evening, in an attempt to lose as much body fat and retain as much lean body
mass as possible. Whilst I personally believe there may be something to it, the
benefits can easily get blown out of proportion, and I will tend to be more
conservative in my conclusions about this until more evidence comes through.
Logic
So not only have we blown the evidence for
eating breakfast and not eating late at night away, but we have actually
flipped it on its head and claimed that eating later at night may be more
beneficial. But let’s just look at this from a logical perspective for a
moment. Imagine two people at opposite ends of the spectrum, both eating just one
massive meal a day. One person eats their meal first thing in the morning, the
other person eats their meal just before they go to bed. For arguments sake, let’s
just say they both have a 2000 calorie/day metabolism.
- The morning eater eats their 2000 calorie
meal for breakfast
- As they are more active during this time,
more of it is burned off as it enters the bloodstream. Let’s give this group
the benefit of the doubt and say that 1,500 calories goes towards fuelling
their metabolism and the remaining 500 calories are stored away as fat.
- After all that food is digested (probably
much later that day), their body needs more fuel for metabolic processes. To be
exact, it needs another 500 calories (as we have already provided 1500 calories
from our food towards their 2000 calorie metabolism.
- They get this from the fat stores and so
end up in equilibrium (500 calories of fat stored, 500 calories burned).
Our late night eater eats nothing
throughout the day, but their metabolism is still running. So their body has to
rely mainly on fat stores to fuel metabolic processes at this time. So,
throughout the day, they burn 1500 calories of fat.
- Late at night, they have their feast. 2000
calories of food comes in.
- As their metabolism is slower at this time,
they only burn 500 calories of it as it enters the blood.
- The remaining 1500 calories get shuttled
away to fat stores.
- This person also ends up in fat equilibrium
because although they stored more fat during the night (1500 calories), they
also burned more fat during the day (1500 calories) when they weren’t eating.
So we can see from this that the main thing
we should be concerned about is the total amount of calories in a day rather
than when we eat those calories. Now, if skipping breakfast had the effect of
lowering metabolism throughout the day, this may not be true. But we have seen
from the studies by Zauner et al etc that this is not true.
If late night eating makes you consume more total calories
in the day, then it can make you gain weight. But if you just
eat the same amount of calories per day, no problem
Tested in the field
We are now seeing a backlash against these
myths. A lot of hardcore fitness fanatics (myself included) are practicing
something called intermittent fasting, a method brought to popularity by Martin
Berkhan of Leangains fame ( www.leangains.com ), Brad Pilon (author of Eat stop Eat) and extensively
tested by the well renowned John Berardi PhD ( www.precisionnutrition.com ). The
general premise is meal skipping, either by skipping a day of eating entirely
(as in Eat Stop Eat) or skipping breakfast (as in Leangains). People are
achieving great successes in changing their body composition for the better by
going against the grain of conventional wisdom.
Whether this method is actually better than
conventional wisdom is debatable. There is potential for better nutrient
partitioning (more nutrients get directed towards muscle tissue post training)
alongside even more exiting health benefits, such as lowered inflammation
levels and, dare I say it, potential life extension. But the overall message I
am trying to convey in this article is to be more relaxed about things.
Recommendations
Hopefully, this article will have opened
your eyes a little and helped free you to make better choices. If you don’t
feel like eating breakfast one day, or ever, then don’t. Listen to your body,
get out of the typical ‘breakfast, lunch, dinner’ societal brainwashing and
just eat when you feel like it. You don’t have to eat breakfast like a king and
dinner like a pauper, and you don’t have to seal your mouth when darkness
comes. I eat nothing for breakfast and occasional have huge amounts of
carbohydrates and calories very late at night, and I have not had a problem
getting down to 6% body fat in the past using these strategies, as are many
others.
Hopefully, you will now have lost the fear associated with late night eating,
and are now free to enjoy meals out with friends, without fear of ballooning.
But, if you’re an athlete looking to
maximize performance, maybe eating breakfast is a good thing for you (maybe not,
you could test it yourself). If you struggle to sleep at night whilst digesting
food, then maybe eating more through the day and less at night would suit you.
If you feel like you can’t go without breakfast or you will die, go ahead and
eat some breakfast. However, I used to think the same. Your body will get used
to breakfast skipping in time, and you will no longer feel the light headedness
and blood sugar crash when you give your body time to retrain itself – if that
is what you wish.
Do what you feel is right for you. This
article, being the flexible diet, is written to open you up to flexibility of
when you eat. Have more freedom now with this newfound knowledge. Just make
sure you keep track of daily/weekly calories, and don’t make up for skipping breakfast
by eating more than your daily allowance of calories in the night.
