Stressing (a) need for a healthy breakfast?

It doesn’t take much to amuse me these days. During the recent wet, grey and autumnal afternoons, I have sometimes switched the TV on to watch an episode or two of ‘Four in a Bed’. It’s a simple concept for a TV show. It’s a competition. Four couples each stay at each other’s bed and breakfast accommodation and score their stay against a variety of different criteria. One of which is the breakfast. Not only is the food judged, the quality of sausages, eggs and so on, but also the service of the hosting couple. It’s the comments and the expressed expectations that I find amusing.

Like me, many of the show’s participants are often disappointed with the breakfast they are served. I’m not sure why after many years of eating breakfast in a range of hotels, that my optimism always triumphs over experience. There are two things that contribute to my disappointment – lukewarm food and the lack of vegetarian options. Stranger still, is that, at home, I never eat breakfast.

Whether we eat breakfast, and what we might eat for breakfast, featured in the news media last week. These stories felt like a welcome relief from the utterly depressing daily diet of unpalatable global news and/or the meaningless celebrity stories. Actually, reading the newspapers these days is enough to put me off my breakfast altogether.

I don’t normally feel hungry in the morning, and so don’t feel the need for breakfast. Which again, might be strange. I’ve been told from a very young age that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I’m the eldest of seven children. As children we would start the day with a bowl of porridge, often laced with chocolate and/or sultanas. Family breakfast on Sunday was always a cooked meal, not quite a full English, but close.

Missing breakfast is not my attempt to lose weight. If I feel I need to lose weight, I simply stop drinking alcohol. In almost what feels like counter intuitive research, the evidence suggests we should try and eat 20% - 30% of our energy at breakfast time if we want to lose weight.

Likewise, I almost never drink coffee, and never in the morning. A cup of coffee in the morning can mask hunger, and of course caffeine doesn’t provide our bodies with energy. What it does is stimulate the adrenal glands to provide a ‘false’ boost of energy. Whilst eating your breakfast before 09.00 is said to help reduce the risk of depression, not eating breakfast at all can also have a negative impact on your mental health.

One of the reasons we shouldn’t drink coffee until after eating breakfast is that doing so helps our bodies regulate the flow of adrenaline and cortisol. The hormone cortisol is sometimes referred to as the stress hormone. Whilst we need cortisol, as it provides our ‘get up and go’ stimulus, too much can be very unhealthy. If like me, you do wake up in the morning and you’re not hungry, it could indicate your body is ‘running’ on cortisol.

High levels of cortisol in the body can indicate chronic stress. High stress levels have been linked to higher risk of heart disease, stroke and anxiety. Now I wouldn’t describe myself as being particularly stressed. I think I’m genuinely just not a breakfast person. That said, it doesn’t explain why I readily look forward to a breakfast when on holiday or staying overnight in a hotel! I’m a morning person. I wake up early, never use an alarm clock, and almost inevitably want to get up and make a start on the day. It’s not that I don’t have time for breakfast, it just doesn’t seem relevant.

One of the other stories I read last week focused upon working mums and how they manage to eat (or not) breakfast each morning. You can read the story here. It was simply exhausting. The story did make me think about a seemingly unrelated story about an essay our future Queen, Kate, published last week.

Kate talked about how children today are possibly ‘the most connected generation of all time’, yet at the same time were ‘often more isolated, lonely and less equipped to form warm, meaningful relationships’. She was citing from the world’s longest-running study into adult development undertaken by the Harvard University. This showed that the best predictor of a mentally healthy life was the quality of an individual’s connections with others. It brought to mind those childhood breakfasts, sitting together around the family table, each of us with a bowl of porridge in front of us. Maybe I am missing something in missing breakfast?