What happens when you skip breakfast?

Breakfast - the most important meal of the day. Breakfast is considered healthy, even more important than other meals. Even today's official nutrition guidelines recommend that we eat breakfast. Studies have confirmed that breakfast helps us lose weight, and skipping breakfast can increase the risk of obesity.

Skipping breakfast can cause your body to lose its eating rhythm. When you wake up, the blood sugar your body needs for your muscles and brain to function at its best is usually low. Breakfast helps bring blood sugar back to normal levels. If your body doesn't get fuel from food, you may feel full of energy but you'll be more likely to overeat later in the day.
Breakfast also gives you a chance to get some vitamins and nutrients from healthy foods like: milk, whole grains and fruit.
To answer the problem of harmful effects when skipping breakfast, this article will take a detailed look at breakfast and whether skipping breakfast is really bad for your health and makes you fat.
Breakfast eaters tend to have healthier habits. That's right, many studies show that people who eat breakfast tend to be healthier. For example, people who regularly eat breakfast and eat breakfast properly will help them to be less likely to be overweight and obese, and also have less risk of chronic diseases. For this reason, many experts have declared that breakfast is important and healthy.
However, these studies are observational studies and cannot prove causation. These studies indicate that people who eat breakfast are more likely to be healthier, but they cannot prove that it is breakfast that causes it. Chances are other healthy breakfast eaters can explain this. For example: people who eat breakfast also tend to eat a healthier diet, with more fiber and micronutrients.
On the other hand, people who skip breakfast tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol, and exercise less. Perhaps these are the reasons why breakfast eaters are healthier. In fact, higher quality studies called randomized controlled trials show that it doesn't really matter whether you eat or skip breakfast.

2.1. Breakfast does not boost metabolism Some people think that eating breakfast kicks up the metabolism, but this is completely unfounded. These people are referring to the thermic effect of food, which is the increase in calories burned that occurs after providing food to the body.
However, what is important for metabolism is the total amount of food consumed during the day and this process takes place no matter when or how often you eat.
Studies show that there is no difference in 24-hour calorie burn between people who eat breakfast or skip breakfast.
2.2. Skipping breakfast does not increase weight As mentioned above, people who skip breakfast tend to gain more weight than those who eat breakfast. This may seem paradoxical, because how could not eating make you gain more weight? Some people think that skipping breakfast makes you very hungry and overeat at the end of the day. This seems reasonable, but is not supported by the evidence. It is true that skipping breakfast makes people hungrier and eats more at lunch, but this is not enough to make up for the skipping breakfast.
In fact, some studies have even shown that skipping breakfast can reduce overall calorie intake by up to 400 calories per day. This seems logical, because you're effectively eliminating an entire meal from your diet each day.
Interestingly, the eat/skip breakfast dilemma was recently tested in a high-quality randomized controlled trial. This was a 4-month study comparing recommendations for eating or skipping breakfast in 309 overweight/obese men and women. After 4 months, there was no difference in weight between the groups. It simply doesn't matter whether people eat or skip breakfast. These results are supported by other studies on the impact of breakfast habits on weight loss. Skipping breakfast has no obvious effect.

2.3. Skipping breakfast may increase peripheral blood cell inflammation A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that skipping breakfast increased peripheral blood cell inflammation after lunch, compared to with skipping dinner or not skipping meals at all.
Both skipping breakfast and skipping dinner caused participants to increase their metabolic energy consumption, but skipping breakfast only had an unfortunate side effect on one's health.
Inflammation is the result of an increase in white blood cells that try to fight off viral or bacterial infections. However, these processes can sometimes overreact, like allergies, and can cause a mess in your body.
Skipping breakfast can increase your body's ability to be irritable. So it's going to be more trouble than it should be if you're the type to easily reach for decongestants or ibuprofen. This increase in inflammatory processes seems to be particularly noticeable in obese individuals.
Another study shows that chronic fasting, such as regularly skipping breakfast, can lead to metabolic inflexibility between switching from sugar to fat as an energy source for the body, can then lead to chronic inflammation.
However, skipping breakfast may even have some health benefits. Because, skipping breakfast is a common part of many intermittent fasting methods. This includes: the 16/8 method, which includes 16 hours of overnight fasting, followed by an 8-hour eating window. This usually ranges from lunch to dinner, meaning you skip breakfast every day.
Intermittent fasting has been shown to effectively reduce calorie intake, increase weight loss and improve metabolic health. However, it's important to mention that intermittent fasting and/or skipping breakfast isn't right for everyone. The effects vary from person to person.

Some people may notice the positive effects of skipping breakfast, while others may experience headaches, low blood sugar, fainting, and lack of concentration.
Or, those who skip breakfast infrequently have lower rates of aging than the control group. They also live 83% longer. Autophagy is a natural process of cellular waste removal that occurs while we sleep and seems to persist due to skipping breakfast. Many other studies have been done in animals, from roundworms to mammals, which seem to agree that regular fasting can prolong life and reduce the risk of other age-related diseases. .
A fairly well-known study investigated the reasons for the longevity of the people of Okinawa, a region in Japan. This study posits that their fasting and calorie restriction practices are among the main causes of this population's health and longevity effects.

Reference source: webmd.com; healthline.com