This Is Why Breakfast Is a Scam

Breakfast might not be the most important meal of the day after all! Find out why. 

What if we tell you that breakfast, the “most important meal of the day”, suggested by experts, and nutritionists worldwide is just a scam? Yes, breakfast is a scam. Is breakfast important? Yes, it is definitely important! You start your day with the pick-me-up meal that your body needs. But the truth is that it’s just as important as any other meal.

Is It Really Necessary To Eat Breakfast?

Breakfast means to ‘break’ your overnight fast. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to eat breakfast in the morning. You can eat it whenever you are actually hungry. The whole “eat breakfast first thing in the morning” is a part of a huge marketing scam that was created by companies to sell their products.

In fact, it is safe to say that breakfast is literally a scam. It is a made up meal that was invented and promoted by marketing companies in the early 1900s with only one goal: to sell more cereal! Were they successful? You bet they were.

The entire marketing campaign was about fulfilling corporate greed rather than nutritional value! Let’s see exactly how these large corporations manipulated consumer behavior and dietary habits, at the expense of public health. 

Do you know who said breakfast is the most important meal of the day? That line (or lie) was invented in the 19th century by James Caleb Jackson and John Harvey Kellogg to sell their newly invented  Kellogg’s breakfast cereal. That’s right! What a genius tagline it is! 

A tagline SO BIG that it birthed a major marketing scam and that is how breakfast was invented as a proper concept. The breakfast scam might just be the longest-running scam in history! A marketing campaign SO big that it convinced millions of people, doctors and nutritionists across the globe to believe it. Insane, right? According to research, there is no difference in the calorie intake or energy levels between those who skip breakfast and those who eat breakfast everyday. 

This marketing campaign was so successful that it changed how we look at breakfast. People consider it to be so healthy that studies suggest those who eat breakfast tend to live a generally healthier lifestyle. They pay more attention to their food intake and exercise more frequently. 

Did Humans Always Eat Breakfast?

Before diving deep into how this incredible cereal scam was pulled, let’s look at the history before breakfast and understand what did people eat before cereal was invented?

We wouldn’t say that breakfast is a hoax. People did eat in the morning before the late 19th century in the US, but it wasn’t considered special. People just ate whatever was available, often leftovers from the night before. This changed due to religious fanatics and lobbyists for cereal and bacon companies.

Eggs have always been a popular breakfast food because chickens lay eggs in the morning and they’re easy to prepare. Meat that could be stored, like cured pork, was also common. However, fresh chicken was rarely eaten for breakfast because no one wanted to kill a chicken first thing in the morning. 

But typically, people always ate breakfast. Probably not the first thing in the morning. They ate whatever they could find whenever they were hungry. 

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How Did Cereal Become The Breakfast Staple? 

In the late 19th century, however, people began to worry about indigestion. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, people moved from farms to factories and offices, spending more time sitting/standing in one place. 

Due to this lifestyle change, heavy farm breakfasts were blamed for causing indigestion, so lighter breakfasts became preferred.

Around this time, during a trend towards healthier living, breakfast cereals were introduced at sanatoriums founded by followers of the newly formed Seventh-day Adventist religion.

These religious health gurus opened sanatoriums and introduced people to vegetarian diets and eating bland, whole wheat as a way to counter ill health. The first cereal, invented by James Caleb Jackson, and the better-known Kellogg’s brand, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, were both born at sanatoriums.

“Jackson was a preacher, and Kellogg, a religious man who believed that masturbation was the greatest evil, which bland, healthy foods like corn flakes could prevent.” Over time, this group, led by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, convinced and brainwashed people that their heavily processed, grain-based, and sugar-laden food called “cereal” was a must-have “health food.” This is how Kellogg’s breakfast products became a staple.

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They used moralizing rhetoric to sell the idea of a healthy breakfast in the 19th century which changed how people thought about the meal. This wasn’t just around religion and health: it also incorporated the dedication and respect for hard work.

In the early 20th century, the idea that if you ate a lighter, healthier breakfast you were going to be more efficient and productive at work added “another moralizing layer”, according to ​​Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal.

So this is how the cliche that breakfast is the most important meal developed from those early days of cereal.

The Result of Eating Your Daily Cereal

Cereal feeds your sugar addiction, making you think it boosts your energy and supports a healthy “balanced diet.”

In reality, this is what happens inside your body:

• You get a short-term sugar rush, which quickly crashes.
• The carbs turn into glucose (sugar) in your bloodstream.
• Your pancreas works overtime, producing insulin to move the glucose from your blood into your fat cells.
• Your fat cells grow larger, leading to gradual weight gain.

So, is cereal healthy? A quick look at the back of the box will tell you clearly: Cereal is not healthy! According to research, if you look at the nutrition profile, cereals contain more sugar and carbohydrates than any other good nutrients. A lot of studies suggest potential risks of eating cereal for breakfast, such as hypertension.  

Take a good look at the “nutrition” ingredients. Most of it is almost 100% carbohydrates, sugar, and a tiny bit of protein. However, they still claim to be super healthy, rich in protein and other big fancy marketing words. 

Surprisingly, this completely misleading false advertising is legal worldwide.

After vitamins were discovered, it didn’t take long before breakfast cereals were advertised as a source of every vitamin. This happened in the 1940s when breakfast became even more important.

During this time, many women were entering the workforce due to the war and needed quick yet nutritious options to feed their kids in the morning. So breakfast advertising shifted to target women. Advertisers used maternal guilt to market cereal as the best food for children, emphasizing the importance of eating breakfast.

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Is Breakfast A Marketing Ploy?

The idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day was pushed by a mix of fear of indigestion, religious moralization, and advertising. According to research, there is nothing special about breakfast that affects nutrition or health. Skipping or eating breakfast is the same as skipping or eating any other meal of the day. 

However, it was a campaign to sell more bacon that truly made people believe that breakfast was indeed the most important meal of the day.

Edward Bernays, a public relations expert for the Beech-Nut company and nephew of Sigmund Freud, exploited these health and moral fears to promote bacon. According to sources, he used psychology to make bacon an important part of breakfast. 

He got a doctor to agree that a protein-rich, heavy breakfast of bacon and eggs was healthier than a light breakfast. He got the signatures of 5,000 doctors on this. Newspapers published the results as if it were a scientific study. This added more credibility to the idea that breakfast was not only important but medically recommended. This made-up breakfast propaganda could actually have a negative impact on our health, leading to weight gain, diabetes and other issues. 

Today, we still mostly eat foods like cereals, bacon and eggs, rolls, bagels, and croissants for breakfast. Dinner and lunch never received the same treatment, and our adherence to these traditional breakfast foods continues.

It’s not just the moralisation that got caught up with breakfast that has changed how we see it, says Arndt Anderson, author of Breakfast: A History.

Unlike lunch and dinner, there is something about the meal that lends itself to judgment.

“I think that the breakfast table is one place where you see the most blatant demonstrations of this human tendency to tie what one eats to who one is,” says Arndt Anderson. “People make their lifestyle change at New Year and every morning is like a small New Year’s Day – a chance to start things off in the right direction. So if you have cold pizza for breakfast, it says what sort of person you are.”

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What Is Scientifically The Best Breakfast?

So, is breakfast as important as people believe it to be? Probably not. 

Now we are not saying that you must skip breakfast all together even if you wake up hungry in the morning. There is a right way of breaking your fast regardless of the time of the day. Studies show that it is best to start your day with food that doesn’t spike your blood sugar levels. These are light meals with lower glycemic load.  

You can consider these to be safe meals in the morning:

• Fruits and vegetables
• Beans and lentils
• Yogurt
• Nuts and seeds
• Whole grains

The Biggest Scam in History?

This was a brief history of breakfast and why you should skip it. So let’s ask this question again: is eating breakfast a scam? By now, you must be convinced that breakfast and cereals, both are scams. Is breakfast necessary? Absolutely. It is as necessary as any other meal of the day. However, calling it “the most important meal” might be a stretch. 

Needless to say, some brilliant marketing campaigns come and go now and then, but “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is undoubtedly one of the biggest scams in history.