Don’t heed the breakfast lobby

The summer solstice is a week away now. Our daylit period has shortened by roughly 15 minutes since last Friday, and will drop by another quarter of an hour per week as we begin the long slide to the shortest day in December.

When I saw the News & Star pictures of the solstice celebrations at Castlerigg stone circle, it occurred to me that I ought to go along one day. But I can’t see it happening any time soon.

It would mean a very early start. I’m not exactly what you’d call a morning person, and never have been. Long before schoolteachers actively encouraged us to think about careers I had already ruled out milkman and postman.

I was reminded of my aversion to mornings earlier this week when I came across again that sanctimonious advice that breakfast is “the most important meal of the day”.

I’m not the only person who can’t bear food first thing in the morning.

I can hardly bear getting up first thing in the morning either. And I strongly suspect that the alarm clock was the invention of one of the great sadists of history, perhaps the man who first told Cilla Black she could sing.

It’s only by mid-morning that I can face anything to eat – and working in an office with a chocolate vending machine means that a caffeine boost is often accompanied by a sugar rush.

All very deplorable, I know. But a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play. It said so on TV.

Around a third of the population regularly skip breakfast. But how healthy is it anyway? Look at the ingredients of even the healthiest sounding cereals and you’ll find that they all contain sugar. Muesli would be virtually inedible it didn’t include it.

There’s also a lot of sugar in your breakfast if you spread jam, marmalade or honey on your toast. Or opt for a full English instead, and swap the sugar for saturated fat.

The people that most often extol the virtues of breakfast are parents.

The nonsense about its vital importance comes from the same arsenal of parental clichés that claim carrots help you see in the dark but too much TV watching will give you square eyes, that Santa won’t bring presents to naughty children, and that you should wear clean underwear every day in case you’re in a road accident.

Or they’ll declare that if you lie in bed until noon at weekends you’re wasting the best part of the day. Surely if you go to bed early you’re wasting the best part of the evening?

There’s no evidence for any of the claims about carrots or TV. I wasn’t always well behaved as a child but Santa always arrived. And if I was involved in a road accident the cleanliness of my underwear is likely to be the least of my worries.

We can safely ignore their advice about breakfast too.

A new study of 38 lean people found that six weeks of regularly eating breakfast had no major effect on their metabolism, body mass, fat mass, or any of the other indicators of heart health.

Some earlier studies do seem to argue in favour of breakfast, but they don’t prove cause and effect. People who eat breakfast also tend to be more physically active, eat less fat, be non-smokers and moderate drinkers.

But it could be that regularly eating breakfast doesn’t make you healthy, but being healthy in the first place makes you more likely to eat breakfast. Breakfast may just be a sign of good health, not a cause of it.

When it comes to scientific or medical research, we always need to be aware of who’s paying for it. The notion that we should all be drinking two litres of water per day was put about by bottled water manufacturers.

As soon as evidence emerged that smoking caused cancer, Big Tobacco started paying for scientists who conveniently came up with evidence that it was safe.

The same strategy is at play among the fossil fuel companies who funded research to suggest that climate change is a myth. Now that it’s become undeniable they’ve changed tack to claim that humans aren’t to blame for it.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if the pro-breakfast lobby is the creation of the cereal manufacturers.

So I’m not going to beat myself up about skipping it. Instead I’ll continue to celebrate the winter solstice. I’m always up in time for Christmas dinner.