So The Government Declaration That Not Eating Breakfast Would Make You Fat, and It Turns Out They Had No Real Proof of That and Also It's Completely Wrong

And now it's disproven.

If you want to keep talking about the Hillary email scandal, please do, that post is below. But I thought i would offer this change-up from MKH for the end of the day.

I have just about heard enough from "government nutritionists."

Researchers at a New York City hospital several years ago conducted a test of the widely accepted notion that skipping breakfast can make you fat.

For some nutritionists, this idea is an article of faith. Indeed, it is enshrined in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government’s advice book, which recommends having breakfast every day because “not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight.”

As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated.

At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was ... the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.

“In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from Columbia University concluded in a paper published last year.

The article then discusses, get this, why government scientists get so much wrong, turning speculation and witchfancy into official government recommendations.

I've lost a fair amount of weight by a combination of calorie restriction, Atkins, and (sporadic) exercise. I've also been Intermittent Fasting, which just means that rather than eating from, say, 7am to 7pm at night (12 hours of an "eating window"), you instead skip breakfast and have lunch at say 1 and dinner at say seven so that your eating window is only six hours long.

In the first instance, you are in a "fed" state (where the body gets energy from food being digested) for 12 hours, and a "fasted" state for 12 hours.

In the second, you are in a fed state for only six hours, and a fasted state for 18 hours.

The theory here is that if the body does not have a reserve of being-digested food to power itself, it must burn fat to provide you with the energy, because what other choice does it have?

So by shrinking the eating window, and expanding the fasting window (and remember, your sleeping hours are all fasting, so those are freebies), you force your body to metabolize fat.

This is becoming a very popular thing; Hugh Jackman does it, famously.

And of course these guys (content warning for language and sexual references):

Does it work? As I'm doing several things, I can't say it definitely works, because, who knows, it could be the other things that are working. However, Atkins seems to have stopped working for me, so I do think it's the IF (Intermittent Fasting).

The thing is, IF works as a calorie-restriction regime, because, when you delay the first meal and refuse late-night eating and snacks, you're automatically restricting yourself from eating a lot of excess calories. And I gotta think that eating late at night (I used to do it all the time; it made me sleepy, so I ate as a soporific) goes right to fat.

But I don't know. It seems to work for me.

A guy on twitter, I think a commenter here too, cobrownell, said there was a lot of scientific/nutrition/medical interest in IF, and at least some studies indicate that there's something to it.

By the way, I have no idea where "witchfancy" came from.

But I saw them open for Blustery Gonadal Defiance at Ozzfest in 2002.

Oh: I have heard women should not do this IF regimen for more than 3-4 days without 1-2 break days in between. Not sure why. Just something I've heard.

Could be bro science.

Oh 2: Obviously, anyone with hypoglycemia or diabetes should only do this in strict consultation with a doctor.

posted by Ace at 08:26 PM

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