False Facts About Breakfast You Always Thought Were True

Surely, this so-called "most important meal of the day" has always been getting humankind up and running, right? Not only is that not the case, but some cultures outright condemned the idea of eating in the morning. Ancient Romans believed you should eat once a day, and any more than that was outright unhealthy. By the Middle Ages, religious etiquette dictated that eating in the morning — before Mass — was forbidden.

Our adoption of a breakfast was a slow thing, and starting in around 1412 some upper-class households were slowly permitted to set a formal morning meal. Those formal breakfasts became more common in the 16th century, and for a time it was typically a meal only eaten by the young, the old, the sick, or by laborers who were forced to simply eat when they could. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that people were put on a schedule like the ones we see today, and with the necessity of punching a timeclock came another necessity: standardized meal times, because we were no longer setting our own schedules like we had for generations.

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? Conventional wisdom says it'll keep you going all day, but what you might not know is that idea is actually based on a slogan used in a General Foods marketing campaign from 1944. They were selling Grape Nuts, and ad men sold the angle, "Eat a good breakfast — do a better job." 

In the middle of the 20th century, vitamins were added to cereals, and marketing campaigns helped paint a picture of breakfast as the most important  — and healthiest — meal of the day. 

While there have been a ton of scientific studies done to try to figure out just what kind of impact having — or skipping — breakfast has, the idea itself is based in half-truths and marketing strategies.

There are a couple different ways you might have heard this one presented, but it's often said there's a direct connection between intelligence and breakfast. Those that eat breakfast are thought to be smarter, and as wonderful as it might be to think that eating breakfast might give you a few extra IQ points, it's unfortunately not true.

In 2015, researchers from Army Medical College and Military Hospital in Pakistan took a cross-section of students, determined whether or not they ate breakfast, and administered an IQ test. The results showed there was no correlation between how a person did on an IQ test and whether or not they ate breakfast.

Even more heartbreaking is the complete debunking of a news story that took the internet by storm in 2016 — that eating ice cream for breakfast was good for boosting brainpower. The study that was quoted over and over again proved incredibly elusive, and needless to say, it was sadly one more example of actual fake news.

Imagine your perfect breakfast, made by someone who has all the time in the world. Did you imagine a tall glass of juice? You probably did, because whether you like orange, apple, or grapefruit, juice is often thought to be one of the staples of a healthy breakfast. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

The first reason juice isn't as healthy as you think has to do with what happens when you turn fruit into juice. Not only do you lose most of the fiber that makes fruit so good for you, you also release the natural sugars. When you eat both fiber and fructose — as you do when you're eating a whole piece of fruit — the fiber keeps a lot of the fructose from being absorbed. Without the fiber, you're getting a major dose of natural sugar that has not only been linked to things like tooth decay and obesity, but is also thought to keep us from feeling full. Studies have shown that while eating whole fruits can lower our risk of things like type-2 diabetes, fruit juice was shown to increase those risks.

Booze for breakfast? Clearly, there's no greater sign of a problem than if you start your day with a glass of wine or a pint of beer... but it turns out there's a long tradition of starting the morning with precisely that.

When President Barack Obama took his pre-G7 summit breakfast with a pint of beer in 2015, it looked odd to American eyes. But it's a hugely popular European tradition that remains to this day, and not just in Germany and Belgium. Even breakfasts in colonial America were often served with a hearty helping of beer, and in Mediterranean countries, a morning coffee is often fortified with brandy or sambuca.

While there was a lull in the idea of serving alcohol for breakfast, there's been a re-emergence of the tradition. Restaurants in London are embracing the idea of breakfast wine, and according to the experts the wines should be dry, lightly chilled, and with a low alcohol content.