Is eating breakfast really that important? There’s a lot of debate about this issue, with evidence on both sides. And the answer is different depending on what health benefits you’re looking for as well. For example, it’s commonly accepted that eating breakfast cuts down on overeating throughout the rest of the day. However, evidence suggests that it actually doesn’t make a difference in terms of your weight. As a result, it can be difficult to decide whether skipping breakfast will help or harm your health goals. This is a particularly important debate if you have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome (AFS) and need to adjust your eating patterns for optimal nutrition and energy. But recent evidence may help settle this debate.
Skipping breakfast is often an unfortunate side effect of having a busy lifestyle. When you have a job, a family, and a myriad of appointments to make, it might make sense for you to skip meals and buy yourself some extra time. Skipping meals can occur at any time of day of course, but it’s more common in the morning. Spending another five minutes in bed is often far more appealing than getting up and making a meal.
Another reason for skipping breakfast to try to lose weight. The idea is that you can cut down on the calories you eat by missing a meal. If you’ve tried this tactic, then it probably leaves you feeling like you’re starving later in the day and eating larger meals than usual, effectively replacing the calories you missed by skipping breakfast. So this tactic usually doesn’t help with weight loss.
Some skip breakfast for other reasons as well. Research shows that:
However, this doesn’t mean that you should start skipping breakfast if you usually eat it because there are benefits to eating breakfast as well.
Although skipping breakfast may not do much to harm your health, people who eat a good breakfast regularly will also benefit. Eating a good breakfast may protect you against high blood pressure, heart disease, and high cholesterol. These are serious issues in the modern world, which is why it’s important to protect your heart against damage.
However, there are other benefits to eating breakfast that may be even more important. A recent study from the University of Hohenheim in Germany used 17 participants to examine the effects of morning breakfast habits. They did extensive testing over three days.
On one day, the participants skipped breakfast; on another, they skipped dinner; and on the third day, they ate all three meals. To ensure good nutrition, the calorie content on all three days was the same, just distributed differently. The researchers took blood samples twice a day to test glucose levels, immune cell activity, and insulin levels.
The participants’ glucose levels were around the same over the 24-hour period, but on the days when they skipped breakfast, they were markedly higher after lunch. This troubling trend was continuous across the other measurements as well, with insulin resistance and markers of inflammation higher at the same time on the day when breakfast was skipped. On the days when they skipped breakfast, the participants also oxidized more fat. This is a natural process that usually leads to weight loss, but it can also have negative implications as well. Oxidizing fat after such as short fasting period may indicate metabolic inflexibility, or difficulty switching between burning fat and burning carbohydrates. Over the long term, this kind of inflexibility can lead to inflammation and problems with maintaining healthy glucose levels.
Inflammation is a serious problem for a lot of people. Even healthy people often struggle to keep their inflammation levels down because of issues with modern lifestyles, and this can lead to a variety of serious problems. Chronic inflammation can lead to cancer, heart disease, stroke, and certain autoimmune diseases as well as to disorders such as AFS. It also affects insulin sensitivity, which is what makes the results of this study so troubling. Because skipping breakfast caused additional inflammation, it may affect insulin sensitivity and contribute to metabolic impairment. And when this occurs, it could increase the risk of obesity and type II diabetes.
However, there isn’t enough evidence at this stage to say definitively that skipping breakfast increases the risk of metabolic impairment or that it will affect your weight and health in this way long-term. More research is needed before the specific effects of skipping breakfast on the metabolism can be fully understood. What is clear, however, is that skipping breakfast may have more health consequences than previously thought. And if you suffer from disorders such as AFS, this could have long-term and very serious consequences.
Inflammation is a serious problem when you have AFS, which is caused by ongoing, chronic stress. Any type of stress can bring on this disorder, from work stress to your environment, emotions, and even what you eat. Adrenal fatigue occurs when the adrenal glands become overworked because of ongoing stress. When your body is stressed, it activates what’s called the NeuroEndoMetabolic (NEM) Stress Response, which in turn activates the adrenals. These tiny glands excrete the stress hormone cortisol. However, this is meant to be a short-term solution to stress, so when it continues over the long term, the adrenals can become fatigued. And because cortisol affects every system and circuit in the body, this can result in a combination of debilitating and worsening physical, mental, and emotional symptoms.
When you have AFS it’s vitally important that you decrease or eliminate sources of stress and nourish your body in every way. This usually means taking up stress reducing pastimes such as yoga or meditation and making key changes to your dietary habits. Regular, nourishing food is essential for your AFS recovery because the damaged circuits in your body need the nutrients to heal themselves and regain their normal balance.
And you will struggle to get the nutrients you need if you’re in the habit of skipping breakfast on a regular basis. Skipping breakfast will also increase the amount of inflammation in your body, further overloading malfunctioning systems and causing additional stress and damage.
The Bioenergetics circuit acts to provide energy for every cell and organ in the body. It consists of the liver, thyroid, and pancreas, and these three organs act in concert to ensure that your body has all the energy it needs to function correctly. This is a very big job, and it’s even bigger when your body is under stress. These organs must work together to ensure that the body’s cells get all the extra energy they need to function at their absolute best. This means secreting hormones and carrying out chemical reactions that convert food into usable energy.
The problem comes when this metabolic circuit becomes dysfunctional. As a result, the body loses its primary defense against stress and the damage it causes. This situation will also cause problems with the body’s energy supply. This is particularly important when it comes to the brain, which needs a continuous supply of glucose to function at its best. So, when the Bioenergetics circuit becomes unbalanced, it can lead to a toxic build up in the body, cause interruptions with detoxification, hamper cognitive function, and slow down the body’s stress recovery.
The signs of problems with the Bioenergetics circuit are usually fairly subtle when you have AFS. As a result, the damage that stress can do to this system was ignored for years, which often resulted in very negative outcomes. However, there are some early signs of dysfunction with this circuit, including sugar cravings, centralized weight gain, and food sensitivities. If ignored, these issues will only worsen and result in more serious issues such as adrenal crashes, severe constipation, and medication oversensitivity, intolerance, or paradoxical reactions. When you have AFS and start to experience these symptoms, it’s a sign that your AFS is advancing and that you need to start taking steps to improve your physical health as soon as possible.
Many of the health consequences associated with skipping breakfast could affect the Bioenergetics circuit. If you have AFS and this circuit is already unbalanced, you will probably experience sugar cravings. And if you’re like most people, you will reach for a sweet snack in response, as this will give you a boost of energy at the same time. Unfortunately, this will combine badly with the effects of skipping breakfast.
The research shows that sweet snacks cause noticeable blood sugar spikes, which can be dangerous for your health on a long-term basis. And when combined with AFS, it may result in frequent drops and rises in blood sugar.
Basically, if you have sugar cravings and eat something sweet, your blood sugar rises. And then, if you already skipped breakfast, your blood sugar will rise even higher. This type of blood sugar instability can be very dangerous and can lead to type II diabetes. It may also hinder the efforts of the Bioenergetics circuit to deliver glucose throughout the body and cause further imbalances with this system.
In adrenal fatigue sufferers, it is especially important to keep blood sugar levels at a steady state to help with recovery. People with adrenal fatigue often have low blood sugar symptoms (but normal blood sugar by blood test) causing them to wake up at night and feel cravings for food late at night. This makes it more important to always keep a snack by you, and for some, it may be better to eat five small meals a day including breakfast. When recovering from adrenal fatigue, it is important to keep feeding yourself and give your body the necessary nutrients for recovery.
Skipping breakfast increases the amount of chronic inflammation in the body. This is a serious problem even if you’re healthy because it can have long term consequences. And if you have AFS, it may cause additional problems for your Bioenergetics circuit.
This circuit is partially responsible for detoxifying the body and controlling inflammation. The liver is one of the body’s primary detoxifiers, which means that it needs to rid the body of the metabolites that accumulate because of stress. When you have AFS, this system tends to break down, which results in increased toxicity in the body. And when you skip breakfast on a regular basis it will make this already bad situation worse. It will cause more inflammation, which will increase the body’s toxicity and overwhelm the already overtaxed liver. And this will further unbalance the Bioenergetics circuit.
It isn’t clear yet if skipping breakfast causes metabolic impairment, but it is clear that it affects the metabolism in some way. And this could have a devastating effect on the body’s Bioenergetics circuit. This circuit is responsible for supplying energy throughout the body, so having this process impaired could cause the organs in this circuit to struggle to carry out their duties. And if they’re already struggling and unbalanced because of AFS, the results could be catastrophic. This combination of consequences makes a compelling argument against skipping breakfast on a regular basis.
If you have a busy lifestyle, then skipping breakfast might seem like an easy way to save some time. And as an added bonus, you might think that it will help with your weight loss efforts too. But getting into this habit may have long-term consequences for your health, particularly if you have AFS. While research shows that in healthy people it doesn’t cause many problems, it does cause higher dips and spikes in blood sugar. In someone with an already sensitive system, these could lead to blood sugar issues, inflammation, and metabolic disorder, and also weight gain. This could negate all the changes you have made towards AFS recovery and leave you feeling even worse than before.
© Copyright 2020 Michael Lam, M.D. All Rights Reserved.
You might think that skipping breakfast is a good way to lose some weight, but it actually will hurt you in the long run. Not only will it not help with your weight loss efforts, but it may also increase inflammation in your body and lead to long term problems.
