Skipping Breakfast Kills You?

If you haven't heard yet you will soon about a A study of older men found those who regularly skipped breakfast had a 27 percent higher risk of a heart attack than those who ate a morning meal. Sound scary for all you non breakfast eaters doesn't it?

“The researchers surveyed nearly 27,000 men about their eating habits in 1992. About 13 percent of them said they regularly skipped breakfast. They were all educated health professionals — like dentists and veterinarians — and were at least 45. Over the next 16 years, 1,527 suffered fatal or non-fatal heart attacks, including 171 who had said they regularly skipped breakfast. In other words, over 7 percent of the men who skipped breakfast had heart attacks, compared to nearly 6 percent of those who ate breakfast”. There was no indications that the ones who said that in 1992 whey regularly skipped breakfast continued to skip breakfast for the rest of their lives, only that 22 years ago they said that they did.

Now the difference between 6 and 7% reads like a one percent differences to me, The researchers calculated the increased risk at 27 percent, taking into account other factors like smoking, drinking, diet and health problems like high blood pressure and obesity. I was unable to find the actual study to see how they did that calculations, but it seems to me that there is more room for a correlation than a causation.

“We don’t know whether it’s the timing or content of breakfast that’s important. It’s probably both,” said Andrew Odegaard, a University of Minnesota researcher who has studied a link between skipping breakfast and health problems such as obesity and high blood pressure. Generally, people who eat breakfast tend to eat a healthier diet,”.

This comes close but does not tell you that the non breakfast eaters shared all the risk that the breakfast eater incurred, that should imply that 5 of those 6 percent occured for the same reason that the breakfast eaters leaving the one percent difference.  Here they made a big assumption and that was because the one differ and that they had recorded was if they reported 22 years ago if they ate or skipped breakfast that skipping breakfast was correlated to the increased heart attack rate, how that related to the difference is unexplained and, in my opinion, explainable.

Personal I skip breakfast ever since I stopped working for a living, as I no longer need the calories I did in those days, but I tend to eat healthy food (still trying to figure out how you eat a diet) though only twice a day and seldom snack. It seems to me that obesity and high blood pressure is much more the likely cause of the increase rate of the heart attacks in the non-breakfast eaters instead of their skipping breakfast.  I just wonder who it is that is trying to get me to eat breakfast? 

So You Believe Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day? Fooled again!