Your mom was convinced that you would be healthier by eating breakfast before heading out to school each morning when you were young. If you didn’t eat breakfast, she may have slipped a breakfast bar into your sack lunch just to make sure you got the nutrients you needed.

This practice was smart for children, as their brains cannot be without glucose during their youth. But is it smart for adults?

Some studies say no while others say yes. The answer depends on the results that you are looking for.

Connection to Heart Attacks and Stroke

A 2019 Australian study reported in the Journal of Cardiovascular Developmental Diseases on the difference of 199,634 adults who either ate breakfast or skipped breakfast over the course of 17.4 years. The surprising results were that people who regularly skipped breakfast were about 21% more likely to experience a cardiovascular event (heart attack or stroke) or die from it than those who regularly consumed breakfast. Their risk of dying from all causes of disease was 32% higher as well.

Connection to Health Risk Behaviors

In another study of 21,972 university students, skipping breakfast increased the likelihood that the student would participate in 11 of 15 different health risk behaviors, all of nine poor mental health indicators and poor academic performance.

The health risk behaviors included the following:
• inadequate fruit and vegetable intake
• frequent consumption of soft drinks
• binge drinking
• using tobacco
• gambling
• not always wearing a seatbelt
• inadequate physical activity
• forgetting to brush one’s teeth
• not seeing a dentist in the past year
• involvement in a physical fight
• inadequate sleep
• using salt with every meal
• eating red meat daily
• not avoiding fat and cholesterol
• gambling
• sedentary behavior

Those who ate breakfast functioned better cognitively and psychosocially.

Connection to High Blood Pressure

A meta-analysis study of six observational studies with 14,189 adults showed that breakfast skipping four or more times a week was associated with high blood pressure in the general population and in those with type 2 diabetes.

What Skipping Breakfast Does to the Body

Skipping breakfast may result in a deficiency of several nutrients including folate, calcium, iron, vitamin A, Vitamin B1, B2, B3, vitamin C, and vitamin D. This could explain why breakfast skippers are more prone to developing certain diseases, especially if they are not getting all the nutrients they need in supplements. Skipping breakfast may also disrupt circadian rhythms as well, affecting sleep patterns, body temperature, appetite and digestion, and hormone levels.

Skipping breakfast may reduce your caloric intake by 252 up to 400 calories per day, and thus result in some weight loss if it’s a new habit. However, studies have found that eating or not eating the ‘most important meal of the day’ did not affect the weight of 309 adults who were overweight or obese.

Eating Breakfast Benefits

Eating breakfast gives your body the nutrients it needs to start the day off right.

In one study, Eating breakfast was also associated with reduced rates of:
• diabetes
• obesity
• stroke
• abdominal fat
• high levels of LDL-cholesterol

You could spend more time finding additional research studies on this topic. For example, there are benefits to intermittent fasting, which delays the timing of your first meal of the day and shows good overall results on your health. Intermittent fasting is not really considered to be breakfast skipping.

Conclusion

The choice is yours. If you’re young and still growing, or older and in need of recovery from injury, the extra nutrients from breakfast may be vital to your condition. If you do skip breakfast, paying attention to the nutrient levels in your body with appropriate supplements may be a way to avoid harmful effects and keep you on a healthy track.