Last time out I highlighted the research challenging some of the commonly held myths regarding the ‘need’ to eat breakfast.
To summarise, the evidence does not suggest:
- Eating breakfast helps weight loss
- Eating breakfast speeds up metabolism
- Skipping breakfast causes increased daily energy intake
What can breakfast do?
In the last post I also highlighted what I think breakfast is. These four points lead into why I think breakfast is important.
- Breakfast is a chance to consume calories.
I work with athletes. More importantly, I work predominantly with youth athletes yet to reach full maturation. I’m therefore happy to take any opportunity to increase energy intake. The 06:30 – 08:30 window before school/work/training provides a really useful feeding opportunity that I’ll advise they take advantage of. Best-case scenario they wouldn’t get another feeding window until 10:00 – 11:00, otherwise we’d be talking 12:00 – 13:00.
However, let’s look at the flip-side of this. I’m a powerlifter myself and I often work with athletes who’ll need to lose body mass at some point during the year. Skipping breakfast, and thereby removing a feeding opportunity, can be a really useful tool to reduce daily energy intake. I think breakfast is the best choice for meal skipping for two main reasons:
- The majority of people are either pushed for time in the morning or would appreciate some extra time in bed.
- If you’re at school/work/training in the morning, you’ll be busy (or at least you should be!) and less likely to focus on feelings of hunger.
There is a third reason also, but we’ll come back to that later.
- Breakfast is a chance to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.
The importance of protein to both athletic and general populations is well established – check out Arentson-Lantz et al. (2015), McLain et al. (2015) and Escobar et al. (2015) for some recent review articles.
Research also suggests that regular protein feedings result in greater muscle protein synthesis over the course of a day than larger doses consumed less frequently (Areta et al., 2013; Mamerow et al., 2014; Murphy et al., 2015). If you’re looking to gain muscle mass or minimise muscle loss this could be a useful feeding window for you.
- Breakfast is a chance to consume useful macro- and micro-nutrients.
We’ve highlighted the importance of protein above. Next on my macro list for athletes would typically be carbohydrates, although this does depends on a few factors. As a general rule, if they’ll be performing a ‘quality’ session reliant on glycolysis or competing later in the day then carbs are advised.
Indeed, a recent RCT published by Clayton et al. (2015) examined the effect of breakfast consumption on evening performance. Here are the Cliffs notes:
- Ten male, habitual breakfast eaters completed two trials – one with a ~730 kcal breakfast and one without.
- The breakfast skipping group consumed ~200 kcal more at lunch.
- Conversely, the breakfast consuming group consumed ~115 kcal more at dinner.
- Total energy consumption was ~20% lower in the breakfast skipping group.
- Performance was tested in a 30 minute cycle test performed at 75%VO2peak performed immediately after 30 minutes of steady state cycling at 60%VO2peak.
- Power output was 4.5% greater in the breakfast consuming group.
Getting into the nuances of how to fuel sessions in an effort to maximise performance vs adaptation is a topic that requires far more consideration. So, for now at least, we’ll park things here!
- Breakfast is a chance to eat and enjoy food.
Food can be a great source of pleasure, commonly associated with feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment (Desmet & Schifferstein, 2008). Starting the day with a nice little dopamine boost is certainly a good way to kick things off.
One of the biggest things I try to emphasise with my athletes is mindfulness, even in regards to food. Yes, I want them to understand what they eat and why they eat it, but also how it makes them feel. Mindful eating may help amplify the level of enjoyment associated with food (Hong et al., 2014) and could potentially be a tool to increase the consumption of ‘healthy’ foods (Robinson et al., 2012).
However, I think it’s important to stress that no food should is associated with feelings of guilt. It has been shown that associating ‘celebration’ (versus guilt) with typically off-limits food items may increase the likelihood of weight-loss (Kuijer & Boyce, 2014), but more importantly, I think it promotes a healthier relationship with food.
Get on the scoreboard early
There is one thing I’ve missed out from my four-point list though. I call it the ‘scoreboard phenomenon’.
Each day we begin with a blank slate and a fresh mind. Because the ‘breakfast’ period is the first feeding window we encounter, I think it may actually carry a little extra importance from a psychological standpoint. Think of the first five minutes of a football match. The drive off the first tee in golf. When that goes well you feel good about things.
Short-term self-efficacy
Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977) highlights the importance of ‘performance accomplishments’ in shaping future behaviours. Put simply, when you succeed in accomplishing one goal, you’re more likely to succeed with the second.
Might this mean that succeeding with your breakfast goal helps you make better choices later in the day? I’m not sure the research had really evaluated this but my hunch says yes.
Breakfast piggybacking
Humans are habitual creatures. We like routine because it means we don’t have waste energy thinking about things, they just happen. Because people tend to have the most stable routine in the morning, it’s perhaps the best time to look to piggyback healthy habits.
Piggybacking refers to attaching a new behaviour onto something that’s already part of a routine. For example, whilst you wait for the kettle to boil you take out a steam-bag of mixed veg from the freezer and pop it in the microwave. Now you’ve hit an extra portion of veggies or two with almost no thought whatsoever.
Increase physical activity?
Last up, I’d like to give an honourable mention for breakfast and its potential role in increasing levels of physical activity.
In the last post, we highlighted the Betts et al. (2014) manuscript detailing findings from the Bath Breakfast Project. This study reported lean breakfast-eaters burnt more calories through physical activity thermogenesis than breakfast-skippers, about 440 kcal extra on average.
However, there was a high degree of variability in the responses of individuals. Some expended less than 90 kcal more, others in excess of 800 kcal. Moreover, this data is in free-living conditions. Knowing that you may be more likely to move less if you’re a skipper may just encourage you to be more consciously active.
Last week (Feb 10th) the same team of investigators published new data from the Bath Breakfast Project (Chowdhury et al., 2016). This time the focus was on breakfast-related energy expenditure in obese individuals. What did they discover this time out? Well, you’ll have to sign up to my Research Review service to find out!
To model stiffness in athletes, researchers or practitioners will commonly seek to determine vertical stiffness during 
The problem with assessing stiffness, or any pretty much any variable within biomechanics, is that it’s almost impossible to truly assess a ‘mechanical’ property during human movement. Every movement task is a skill and is therefore governed by a host of conscious and sub-conscious control mechanisms.
We discovered that significant asymmetries between limbs were exhibited in each type of task, however, the way in which these asymmetries presented was different in each task.
In short, it depends on the athlete and what they do. Much like choosing an agility test, we should seek to find the task with the closest correspondence to an athlete’s sport.
