For years we were told not to skip breakfast. Then we began skipping it on purpose. Now the science of circadian rhythms is changing the conversation again — and the answer is more interesting than yet another rule about when we are allowed to eat.
Breakfast is probably the only meal that has managed to become a moral category. Generations grew up with the idea that a responsible adult does not leave the house without something in their stomach, and the sentence that breakfast is "the most important meal of the day" was repeated so long it sounded less like a nutritional claim and more like something we simply know.
Then came the internet. Intermittent fasting turned skipping breakfast into a discipline; morning hunger became something to be conquered; and the first meal of the day shifted gradually toward noon. What was once a sign of an orderly life — breakfast at eight — had, a few years later, become the proud declaration of an equally orderly person who explained that they consumed no calories before twelve.
Both ideas share something in common: they love rules far more than the human body does.
The scientific literature on breakfast is a good illustration of how complicated nutrition becomes the moment we leave the world of slogans. Observational studies frequently find that people who regularly skip breakfast have worse metabolic outcomes. The problem is that people who eat breakfast and people who don't are not two laboratory-identical groups distinguished only by one sandwich. They differ in sleep, work, physical activity, overall diet, income, smoking habits and a whole range of things that are difficult to separate out cleanly.
When we look at randomised trials, the story becomes less dramatic. Meta-analyses have not shown that simply introducing breakfast carries any special power over body weight; some have even recorded a small short-term weight reduction in people who skipped it. At the same time, in some analyses skipping was associated with a rise in LDL cholesterol. In short: neither "eat breakfast without fail" nor "skip breakfast and fix your metabolism" is a particularly good interpretation of the evidence.
And then a clock entered the conversation. Not the one on your phone, but the biological one. Almost every cell in the body participates in a system of daily rhythms that helps the organism anticipate the alternation of light and dark, sleep and waking, activity and rest. Light is the most important signal for the central circadian clock, but the timing of meals can also communicate with the peripheral rhythms in the organs involved in metabolism.
This is where breakfast becomes interesting again. Not because it turns out our grandmothers possessed secret metabolic knowledge, but because scientists are increasingly asking whether health depends not only on what and how much we eat, but also when. That, however, still does not mean there is a perfect hour for breakfast.
A person who wakes at six, trains before work and is genuinely hungry by nine is not the same person as someone who works late, wakes at ten and cannot bear the sight of food for the first hour of the day. Attempting to fit both into the same time window looks tidy on an infographic but considerably less tidy in real life.
Hunger, after all, is information. We need not act on every signal immediately, but there is little sense in treating it as a character flaw to be overcome. If you wake up hungry, eat breakfast. If you are not hungry the moment you open your eyes, there is no need to eat by force simply because the clock says eight.
The far more interesting question is what happens when the first meal finally arrives. A croissant and coffee are breakfast in the calendar sense. Physiologically — like any other meal — their effect depends on composition, quantity and the rest of the day. A breakfast with some source of protein, fibre, fat and carbohydrate will probably behave very differently from something grabbed between the front door and the first meeting.
Perhaps that is why we were wrong to treat breakfast for so long as a matter of discipline. Its more interesting role is not to demonstrate that we live properly, but to make a good start to the part of the day that comes after it.
In Belgrade, talking about a precise breakfast time has its own particular absurdity. On a weekend, the first espresso might arrive at ten, eggs at noon, while the person at the next table is already thinking about lunch. The boundary between breakfast and lunch has long been porous enough that we had to invent brunch — an English word for the very simple acknowledgement that people do not always want to eat on schedule.
At VERA we have gone one step further and kept breakfast available all day. This is not a nutritional theory. Sometimes a person simply wants eggs at four in the afternoon, and it is hard to find a serious argument for why the calendar should forbid it.
Perhaps that is also the most reasonable conclusion to the entire debate. When we eat is probably part of the metabolic picture, and circadian rhythm research is worth paying attention to. But between that and turning 8:37 into the "optimal breakfast time" lies an enormous space that the internet is very happy to skip over.
Breakfast is back, then. Only this time it does not need to be the most important meal of the day. It just needs to be good.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Breakfast at VERA →