Читать книгу Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing - Terence Kealey, Terence Kealey - Страница 22

I have explored the two major explanations for the apparent paradox of breakfast eaters consuming more calories than breakfast skippers while being slimmer; now let me offer five more:

1 Healthily minded people ‘know’ they should eat breakfast

2 People under-report their food intake

3 Breakfast skipping is not properly defined

4 ‘Kick-starting’ metabolism

5 Breakfast skippers are owls, not larks.

Let’s look at these in turn.

1. Healthily minded people ‘know’ they should eat breakfast (aka the ‘compliance’ effect): Consider a survey published in 2003 from the Massachusetts Medical School.¹ That survey confirmed that people who ate breakfast were slim, but the researchers warned that their ‘findings cannot be considered causal’ because most of their subjects were ‘white middle class members of a health maintenance organization … [who] were highly motivated … in their own health’. And what in 2003 did members of health maintenance organisations know? They knew that breakfast was the most important meal of the day! Most of the survey’s subjects were, therefore, complying with medical advice to eat breakfast, but they were also complying with the advice of not overeating during the course of the day.

Normally, of course, people do well to comply with medical advice, but such compliance can sometimes be dangerous. Consider vitamin D deficiency. A Swedish medical team has monitored a cohort of some 30,000 healthy women, of whom some 2,500 died from natural causes over twenty years. To minimise their risks of developing malignant melanoma, many of the women had avoided exposure to the sun. Such women had thus become vitamin D deficient and, as a consequence, their overall death rate from all disease … doubled. In the words of the paper: ‘the mortality rate amongst avoiders of sun exposure was approximately twofold higher compared with the highest sun exposure group … the effect was presumably attributable to cancer, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease.’²

Compliance dangers are perennial because medical science advances perennially, and such advances invariably take doctors and patients into unknown territory, where the law of unintended consequences can apply. And one important compliance danger is breakfast. Your doctor may assure you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but that self-same doctor would once have assured you that babies have to be laid to sleep on their tummies (see below).