Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 189 posts

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#121

Post by raverbashing »

PaulHoule wrote: post #67
coldtea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it. (a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the e…

If anybody is telling you to eat when you are not hungry, check to see if they are selling something.

This is the kind of thing that sounds right but makes absolutely no sense at all

Exactly because the sense of hunger is not correlated with the exact need to eat is that we have obesity.

Eating only when hungry sounds like a good idea but then you get (usually fat) people complaining they are hungry all the time.

An average adult will spend around 12h (and probably more) physiologically fine without food, until its glycogen reserves are depleted.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#122

Post by pessimizer »

cmurf wrote: post #8
gravypod wrote: post #7

Isn't the first meal that you eat in the day your "breakfast?" Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".

Yes from the "words have meaning" point of view, breakfast is unavoidable.

Or rather from the "words have a meaning consisting of the combined meanings of their root words, or in the case of compound words, the combined meanings of their constituent words" - summarized as the "silly" point of view.

You don't break a fast anyway, it's a metaphor. You can only break physical things. You interrupt it. Wait, that just means between + break in Latin. That doesn't even make sense - you're ending the fast, not pausing it... but wait, aren't you pausing it - because eventually you'll cease eating. Maybe all words are just convenient labels using metaphors to help us remember them. Anarchy!

edit: I thought about it a little longer, and wondered if "end" might be a better word, then realized that was a physical metaphor too. I've finally settled on a word that makes strict sense: "terminate." From now on, the appropriate word for the first meal you eat after not eating, no matter the time of day or even whether there was a period during that time when you were sleeping (hence every single meal and every single snack) will be "fastermination." And you shouldn't look at me weirdly when I say that; I'm just using English (or Latin or whatever) properly, and in the grand scheme of things, I'm more right than you are.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#123

Post by _0w8t »

markbnj wrote: post #50

I'd be interested to know whether the author eats in the evening. I don't think he mentioned one way or another. I don't eat anything after a light dinner and I usually wake up very hungry. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but if someone typically sleeps 6 to 8 hours starting at, say, Midnight, and the last meal prior to retiring was at 7 PM, that is 12-13 hours without food.

What is wrong with 12-13 hours without food? During the month of Ramadan Muslims do not eat or even drink for about that time and medical studies found no harm in general in doing that.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#124

Post by skrause »

coldtea wrote: post #63
mmastrac wrote: post #5

This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Studies that support his conclusion, while flawed, are probably right. Studies that oppose it are obviously tainted by various problems. The fact that research shows that breakfast is actually beneficial for children is hand-waved away because 'reasons'. This is honestly just a low-quality, cherry-picked opinion piece by someone who really…

> This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it. (a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the e…

I can personally confirm that I used to have a strong correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity. Back when I used to eat a big pizza at 11 pm followed by some beer I could never eat the next morning because I was still full, so I skipped breakfast and didn't eat until lunchtime.

However, the skipped breakfast was not the cause of my overweight, but simply the result of eating far too much in the evening. So maybe there actually is a correlation, but as always: Correlation does not imply causation.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#125

Post by maxerickson »

curun1r wrote: post #114
maxerickson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it is at least a ways into adolescence. Understanding vitamins and trace minerals was a pretty big step forward.

I actually think it wasn't. It was our first foray into nutritionalism [1], which is the belief that foods can be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed and still be healthy. This has proven wrong over and over again. No matter how much we discover about what our foods contain, it's been consistent over the past 150 or so years that when we process food, it removes healthy stuff that doesn't get reintroduced when…

People were aspirationally eating the highly processed flour anyway. Adding vitamins made that healthier!

Nixtamalization is an easy example of a process that enhances nutrition. Perhaps the world would be better if people were not constrained to eating so much corn that it mattered, but that isn't the world we have. The list of beneficial processes goes on and on and on, but I like that one because it involves adding caustic chemicals to a starchy grain. Another good one is pickling. Controlled rotting with those hip probiotics!

The issue with modern food science isn't that it is over reductionist nonsense, it's that it is used to decrease satiation and increase palatability. It turns out that when huge resources are devoted to figuring out how to get people to eat more, you get results. I cringe every time I see Sabra Hummus advertise their great new idea, a fourth meal where you and your family cram Sabra Hummus in your mouth.

I certainly hope we can take our medical understanding of diet and nutrition to a place where it is easier to help people lead healthy lives, but I'm not going to sit here and look at the elimination of deficiency diseases as the start of some sort of modern disaster.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#126

Post by jaggederest »

markbnj wrote: post #50

I'd be interested to know whether the author eats in the evening. I don't think he mentioned one way or another. I don't eat anything after a light dinner and I usually wake up very hungry. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but if someone typically sleeps 6 to 8 hours starting at, say, Midnight, and the last meal prior to retiring was at 7 PM, that is 12-13 hours without food.

I usually fast for 16 hours a day, and I don't wake up hungry at all. Usually I only start to get hungry around the ~14-15 hour mark.

Hunger is something that can be trained, not simply a static phenomenon. There's a reason you get hungry when you smell something delicious. If you eat every day shortly after waking up, I'd certainly expect to be hungry at that time.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#128

Post by beamatronic »

Breakfast became "magical" to me when I started eating high-protein breakfasts - basically eggs and bacon or sausage instead of cereal. The years I ate cereal for breakfast, I was battling to stay awake until lunch time. I felt so sleepy in class. Years later I moved to San Francisco and started eating eggs almost every day in SoMa cafes. I could not believe the difference. I was wide awake and had so much more energy.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#129

Post by magicbeanss »

pizza wrote: post #10

Honestly, fasting for >16 hr/d >> eating breakfast, in my experience. Pet-theory is that you get a lil' neurotransmitter upregulation as an added benefit ;) Thoughts?

Agreed. I fast before working out in the morning, and usually break the fast by noon. On weekends I'll often eat breakfast and then fast the rest of the day.

I'm a woman, and on birth control, so fasting doesn't mess with my hormones so much, but I read that women tend to respond to fasting with heightened color vision and vivid sensorial experiences, which I can anecdotally confirm.

That said, I can only practice intermittent fasting for one to two days at a time before it starts negatively affecting my workouts and attention span.

Re: There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

#130

Post by sathackr »

mmastrac wrote: post #69
coldtea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reads like "I don't eat breakfast, so here's the reasons why I'm right." Actually he gives very reasoned arguments and comments on meta-studies showing that he is right -- not that breakfast is bad, but in that it doesn't make any difference, and if it does nobody has clearly shown it. (a) . In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the e…

(a), (b), (d), and (e) are where he's argued that support for "breakfast is good" is methodologically weak, but then he goes and brings out (c) as an argument for his conclusion, while also being methodologically weak at the same time. You've also neglected to mention (f), where the author discusses studies that show that breakfast is beneficial to children and then handwaves both of them away: > What about the argum…

> It has been found that children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight than children who eat two breakfasts.

What if overweight children are more likely to skip breakfast?

Post reply on HN