Should I Be Eating Breakfast?

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Should I Be Eating Breakfast? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the health expert.

M.K.

Gross from Facebook asks, you say breakfast is important, but I thought intermittent fasting was the way to go. Should I be eating breakfast? I know, it's gotten really confusing, right? Hey, it's JJ and I've got Dr. Sarah Ballantine, also known as the Paleo mom, with me and she's going to answer this question. She is the world's famous leading expert on the autoimmune protocol and she manages her own autoimmune disease with diet and lifestyle. She has a gift for translating complex scientific research into understandable, actionable strategies. Plus, on the side, she's a professional improv comedy performer. She'll be right back, so stay with me.

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Studies show that eating breakfast is actually really important for our health. And this is even seen in studies looking at intermittent fasting. So taking a step backwards, there's this huge collection of epidemiological studies that link breakfast eating as a food habit to better health outcomes. So for example, routinely sipping breakfast increases risk of type 2 diabetes by 55%. It increases risk of cardiovascular disease by 21%. And studies that look at all cause mortality. Now that's a really great sort of broad measure of health and longevity, show that routinely skipping breakfast increases risk of all cause mortality by 32%. Those are huge numbers, huge increases. And so research over the last few years have really tried to understand if there's benefits to intermittent fasting. Why do we also see that eating breakfast is so important? And what studies have actually revealed is that time restricted feeding, which is what intermittent fasting is supposed to be, actually has some really neat effects. So it actually can increase metabolic rate a little bit. So when you shorten your feeding window, you actually can burn more calories during the day, 90 calories in a 24 hour period for most people, and it can actually improve insulin sensitivity a little bit. Now I want to take a step back to the side and say that the impact of intermittent fasting, time restricted feeding on metabolism, on insulin sensitivity, those are really small numbers compared to just eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, being active and managing stress. So all of those things are like the low hanging fruit of health and really need to be dialed in before playing with intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is really like a next level strategy for getting that like last 5%, you get the 95% by getting enough sleep, managing stress, living an active lifestyle and eating a veggie rich, nutrient dense diet. So getting back to our main, our main idea. So intermittent fasting, what's really interesting is studies have compared intermittent fasting, where you skip breakfast versus skipping dinner. So in one, it's called early time restricted feeding so our feeding window happens early in the day. So eating breakfast say within an hour after getting up and maybe having that last meal around like 3 o' clock in the afternoon versus a late time restricted feeding window. So that's the traditional, what we're seeing. A lot of advocates of intermittent fasting recommend, you know, get up and don't eat your first meal of the day until noon or 2 o'. Clock. And what the studies actually reveal is that while both of them can sort of increase this energy expenditure, so this extra 90 calories or so burned throughout the day when you skip breakfast compared to skipping dinner, skipping breakfast actually triggers increased inflammatory responses and actually causes some insulin resistance. So actually measures of insulin resistance trigger show that if you skip breakfast, when you finally do eat, you're gonna have a 54% increase in insulin resistance compared to eating breakfast and skipping dinner. So studies actually overwhelmingly support the idea of eating breakfast kind of no matter which way you come at it. And that's not to devalue the effects of intermittent fasting, but really the right way to do intermittent fasting is, is with this early time restricted feeding. So eating breakfast and then having our last meal of the day in the sort of mid afternoon. It's also important to emphasize that there are a lot of people for whom intermittent fasting is not necessarily applicable. So anybody who has unmanaged stress, anybody who has hormones that are out of whack, there are some people who respond to intermittent fasting with a stress response. And it's not really necessarily very well understood who's going to have this magnified stress response. But studies overwhelmingly show that a 12 hour feeding window is associated with health without being enough to sort of trigger this stress response that may further adrenal issues or hormone imbalances. So a 12 hour feeding window actually works very well. So what that means is eating breakfast shortly after waking up and eating an early dinner, not snacking after dinner, not snacking right before bed, and sort of separately, studies show that not eating for about four to five hours before going to bed improves sleep quality. And of course improving sleep helps to regulate the stress response, helps us make better food choices, helps regulate appetite, and food cravings, helps makes us more motivated to be active. So that's probably the link between that early dinner as being the sort of cutoff in terms of when we're eating during the day, and all of the health benefits. So yes, breakfast really is maybe not the most important meal of the day, but it is really important to eat breakfast. And ideally that breakfast should be the same type of balance between animal foods and plant foods as we would eat at dinner. So eating a moderate portion of a high quality animal food like you know, fish or meat, grass fed beef for example, while eating, you know, three quarters of the plate would be a variety of vegetables, some fruit. That same balance that would make a healthy meal at any time of the day is what makes a healthy breakfast.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribe to JJ.com.

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