
Breakfast is a relatively modern invention - dialoguediscou
https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/breakfast-is-a-marketing-gimmick-c47082ef4c28
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glangdale
I like breakfast foods (I'm a real sucker for those "big breakfasts" available
at most Australian cafes) but I am _really_ not that hungry in the morning.
One of the easiest ways I found to lose weight was just to quit ingesting
calories in the evening around 8pm and not eat until noon the next day - the
whole 16:8 intermittent fasting thing before it was a "thing".

I'm a bit crestfallen at the amount of dull breakfasts I shovelled into my
face based on all that propaganda about how your body would go into some sort
of horrible famine state if you missed a meal. I mean, hey, if you're actually
hungry and you like breakfast cereal, go for it, but I was definitely taking
on more calories for no apparent reason.

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code_duck
“Breakfast Is A Marketing Gimmick”, the actual title, seems to sum this up
better than “Breakfast is a relatively modern invention”. I don’t think the
article is trying to claim that that eating food in the morning is new.

Personally, I have always gotten up and eaten the same things in the morning
but I do the rest of the day. This might be due to hailing from New Mexico…
Like the south, we enjoy a lot of hearty breakfast. The typical breakfast in
New Mexico is huevos rancheros, which is eggs, hashbrowns and sausage or bacon
smothered in NM red or green chile sauce.

There is a traditional food eaten for breakfast in the Southwest and all of
America south of here, though, which is basically corn porridge.

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kstenerud
The problem is that the article is written in a confusing manner, and
effectively conflates "breakfast" the act of eating in the morning with
"breakfast" the modern marketed morning meal. You have to read it very
carefully to get what he's trying to say.

"breakfast" the act of eating in the morning has been around for centuries.
Both titles are misleading.

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leethargo
And then there is a third meaning of "the first meal of the day" (breaking the
fast of the night) which may happen in the morning or later.

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moltar
Or even the next day ;)

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leethargo
So true, and so worth mentioning :-)

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vfc1
Some of the highly processed cereal breakfasts should literally be forbidden,
especially kids breakfast is very worrying.

Seriously, take the cereals that you give your kids, and read the ingredient
list, you will be shocked. The second ingredient in the list is usually sugar,
and the third is often palm oil.

The chocolate-like cereals are usually made of corn flour and not whole
grains, which is even worst.

Here is a very tasty breakfast that is very healthy, and easy to prepare, I
eat it every day.

Just take two tablespoons of rolled oats (not a lot of oats), and add frozen
red fruits. Frozen fruits retain the majority of their nutrition, and are
found everywhere and are very convenient.

Blueberries, raspberries, etc. take a cup, cover with plant milk and a
tablespoon of ground flack seeds. Mix and microwave for 1.5 to 2 minutes.

Just to cut the red fruits potential acidity and to make it more fun, you
might want to add a teaspoon of jam, not more.

Take 1 banana, mash half and slice the other half. Mix the mashed half and put
the slices on top.

You won't be hungry until lunchtime, enjoy!

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arcticbull
Or just don't eat breakfast. The whole 3 meals a day thing is both new and
just as social construct. You get used to not eating breakfast really fast, I
stopped a decade ago. There's interesting research showing that meal timings
are as important if not more important (assuming otherwise complete nutrient
profile) than what you eat. Your body learns what high and low levels of
insulin look like by experiencing both. Not eating as frequently reestablishes
that baseline and helps avoid insulin resistance, and hence type-II. It also
gives you a larger caloric budget over your remaining meals making it easier
to lose weight.

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vfc1
I've been thinking about it to give a boost to my weight loss after this long
winter.

I have a couple of questions if you have a moment, do you feel energized in
terms of work in the morning, or feel a bit slugish?

If it goes away the lack of productivity, how long does it take to go away?
And do you feel hungry in the late morning at first, how long until you don't
feel hungry anymore?

For what I heard so far, intermittent fasting is a great tool in the arsenal,
but it's not more important than food choices so I haven't given it a go so
far.

Thanks for any insight on your experience, kind regards.

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glangdale
Not parent poster, but I have done the same thing for a long time. I tried 5:2
and 16:8 (the former refers to days, the latter hours, of course). I find that
the long fast (8pm to about noon the next day) is almost undetectable (it
helps that I enjoy espresso; some might find it horrible or too acid on an
empty stomach).

5:2, on the other hand, was bad for productivity as I would spend the low-cal
days thinking about food.

I dropped from about 110kg to 94kg (disclosure: also training a lot of BJJ,
weights, etc) mostly by IF'ing. I ate ice cream and all sorts of fun stuff the
whole time (not tons of treats, but it wasn't a 'hair shirt' diet). Average
weight loss was about 50g per day (averaging closer to 70-100 initially, then
dropping off). Weighing in every day and putting it in a spreadsheet helped.

I found it way easier to focus on "food hours" vs "food choices". Honestly imo
some 0imes you're just going to have pizza or a burger or ice cream or
something. If you can eat clean and healthy 100% of the time, good on you, but
it's hard to stick to that day-in, day-out for months, and I know plenty of
'clean eaters' who eat way too much 'clean food' and/or cheat and/or give up
and are as a result fat.

IF with noon-8pm as a feeding window and a focus on hours not Magic Food
Choices also allows you to largely behave like a normal person socially unless
your life revolves around social breakfasts (which would be cool, I guess, but
not that typical).

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azinman2
My doctor just recommended to me to do the slow carb diet. She says it’s the
most reliable way for her patients to lose weight in a healthy way. The good
thing about it is there’s a mandatory cheat day once a week, so you can eat
all the ice cream / burgers you want (within reason) on that day. Makes it
more palpable. Today is day 1 for me... hardest thing will he meal planning
for the other 6 days....

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glangdale
Cheat days are good. I had 1/week coinciding with team meal and Friday night
take-out (still on a 16:8 pattern, but food selection was essentially a free-
fire zone). I'm not sure if they are effective because of all the broscience
about "not permanently resetting your body into famine mode" or because they
allow you to stay sane over a long diet and actually stick to it, but either
way...

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bashwizard
I doubt it.

The word "Frukost" (breakfast in english) has been used since the 15th century
in sweden to describe the first meal of the day. Before "frukost" we used the
words "dagvard" and "nattvard" to label the main meals during the day where
"dagvard" was usually the first meal during the morning. It later shifted
meaning and became what is now called dinner.

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kasperni
Funny thing. Frukost in Denmark and Frokost in Sweden. Both came from the term
vrōkost (tidlig kost) in Mittelniederdeutsch (Middle Low German) in the 15th
century. In Sweden you still use Frukost for the first meal. In Denmark the
usage has been replaced by Morgenmad (morning food) to refer to the first
meal. And Frokost now refers to the middle meal (lunch).

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Uberphallus
Funnily that happens also in French. Déjeuner means literally breakfast (as
in, breaking the fasting). But for some reason it moved to mean lunch, and to
say breakfast you say "pétit déjeuner", or "little breakfast".

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wodenokoto
This article tries to make it sound like the idea of breakfast - a meal in the
morning - was a new invention, when it appears to actually be arguing that the
types of meals associated with breakfast are new.

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klingonopera
There's a great four-part documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays, his
career and the rise of marketing in the 20th century called "The Century Of
The Self".

It's available on YT:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

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ncmncm
Bernays was very proud of the work of Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda
mimister. He considered it the best kind of use of his work, steering the
ignorant masses to support of a Great Man's ideas.

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donpark
So breakfast is an American invention? I ask because Korean words for
breakfast and brunch existed even before America was founded.

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iopq
A Korean breakfast is completely different from an American one.

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isostatic
So American breakfast is relatively modern?

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Scoobert
America is relatively modern

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isostatic
Quite. I have older books.

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BrissyCoder
I've never eaten breakfast. I don't tend to get peckish until around 1ish and
I always do my best work post-morning-coffee and pre-eating-anything.

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namdnay
Office job? Any kind of manual labour or outdoor activity, there's no way I
can last the whole morning without eating.

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ramblerman
Not OP, but I will usually do an intense workout of ~1h at 7am fasted. I don't
eat till about 2pm without issues.

Of course that is still different from 4-5 hours of heavy labor. Although on
weekends I've climbed mountains, and swam fasted without issues as well.

You'd be surprised how easy it is, the hunger pangs are only the first few
days.

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rlue
When I discover that my beliefs have been shaped in part by a marketing
message, I always have to restrain myself from overcompensating as I try to
revise my worldview, as in:

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

"No, that's marketing! I refuse to be manipulated. Breakfast is a scam!"

When really, the truth is that breakfast is nice but everything is culturally
relative and humans are capable of adapting to a surprisingly wide range of
routines, provided you maintain them long enough to get through the rough
patches. Sadly, that doesn't make for a very catchy slogan.

Sometimes I think I'd be better off never having heard this notion at all, but
hey, the cost of living in society is being exposed to infectious ideas.

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Theodores
Try telling this to a two year old. By the time we get to be able to read the
cereal packets we are likely to be agreeing with the marketing material and
eating the product as if our lives depended on it. We will be fully
indoctrinated by then.

It doesn't matter how ludicrous this breakfast meal is, or how unnatural it
looks, we fully believe that these products are made because the product
owners care about our health and well being.

In the days before the internet there was no way of finding out an answer to
what breakfast is really about, you were kind of stuck with the marketing
message. Even today when - for clickbait reasons - you read an article such as
this one then it is going to come too late, one's habits of starting the day
with sugar/fat/carbohydrates is very much a habit where change is not a
realistic option. Changing one's diet is hard, almost as hard as changing
one's mind.

What I didn't get in the article was the point made about bacon being
something that just farmers ate. There must be some other thing going on with
bacon - was it something that changed as a product with refrigeration or
factory farming?

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m0nty
The writing is really odd.

"According to the Dansville Historical Society, Jackson would create and use
this cereal in his sanitarium in Dansville NY."

Well, did he or didn't he? Why say "would create" when you meant "created"?

"In 1878 Jackson would have a visitor to his medical facility, Dr. John Harvey
Kellogg"

Again ...

"These institutions would teach that if you ate a healthy breakfast you could
be more productive at work. Of course, that would be an excellent selling
feature that would win over converts. Cereal companies would begin to pop up
like weeds."

I'm not usually so picky, natural voice, etc. But it seems odd to use "would"
all the time.

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Terretta
It’s a verb tense for when your story starts in the more distant past and then
describes a future that will come to pass relative to that past. Makes more
sense if you add the (unnecessary) additional words “go on to”.

Here’s a guy at a past point in time. That guy would go on to create the
cereal, and would go on to have a visitor ...

Merriam Webster: _past future_ adj. — of, relating to, or constituting a verb
tense that is traditionally formed in English with _would_ or _should_ and
denotes an action or state as future from a past point of view (as would write
in “he promised that he would write”)

More: [https://www.thoughtco.com/future-in-the-past-
grammar-1690811](https://www.thoughtco.com/future-in-the-past-grammar-1690811)

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m0nty
> "These institutions would teach that if you ate a healthy breakfast you
> could be more productive at work. Of course, that would be an excellent
> selling feature that would win over converts. Cereal companies would begin
> to pop up like weeds."

Why not "These institutions taught that if you ate a healthy breakfast, you
would be more productive at work. Of course, that was an excellent selling
feature and won over converts. Cereal companies popped up like weeds."

I understand the tense being used, I'm just puzzled why anyone would want to
use it _so much_.

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julienreszka
Hahahaha what an absurd statement.

