There are certain nutritional sentences we have heard so many times they no longer sound like claims but like natural laws. 'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day' is probably the best-known. The problem is not breakfast. The problem is the word most important.
The problem is not breakfast. Breakfast can be an excellent meal. The problem is the word most important.
When we look at randomised studies rather than habit and marketing, there is no good evidence that an adult must eat breakfast to maintain a healthy body weight. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the BMJ analysed 13 randomised trials and found no evidence that adding breakfast aids weight loss. In those short-term studies, people who were introduced to breakfast actually consumed more total energy on average across the day — though the quality of the studies and differences between them are reason enough not to turn this result into a new rule along the lines of "skip breakfast."
That is, in fact, the most interesting conclusion: we do not need to replace one dogma with another.
If you wake up hungry, breakfast makes sense. If you train in the morning, have a long day ahead, or know that without a meal before noon you become someone nobody wants in a meeting, breakfast can be very practical. If you are not hungry until eleven, there is no known metabolic alarm that will trigger simply because you didn't eat toast within the first thirty minutes of waking.
What matters far more is what we eat when we do decide to have breakfast.
A sweet pastry and a sugary drink are breakfast by the clock, but they are not necessarily particularly filling. A meal with protein, fibre, vegetables or fruit and a source of fat has an entirely different structure. Reviews of intervention studies show that breakfast composition — particularly protein content and whether food is solid or liquid — can meaningfully alter satiety and appetite later in the day.
This matters also because nutritional studies frequently conflate two separate things. People who regularly eat breakfast in observational studies often have other health-associated habits: they exercise more, eat differently, smoke less, or have a more regulated daily rhythm. When we compare such a group to people who skip breakfast, it is easy to attribute to breakfast something that may belong to an entire way of life.
There is also a new obsession with meal timing. Circadian rhythm research and time-restricted eating are serious fields of inquiry, and there are reasons to think that when we eat may be metabolically relevant. But from there it is a long way to claiming that everyone must eat the same meal at the same time. A human day is not a laboratory, and people differ in their work patterns, sleep, training, appetite and habits.
That is why the idea of all-day breakfast feels far more natural to us than the idea that breakfast has a sell-by time of 11:00.
Breakfast is a name for a type of meal as much as for a time of day. Eggs, avocado, porridge or granola do not become nutritionally meaningless at 14:30 simply because someone long ago decided that is when we should be eating lunch. If you got up late, spent the morning in back-to-back meetings, or simply want eggs in the afternoon, your body does not check the menu before beginning digestion.
This is, of course, a very convenient philosophy for VERA, since we serve breakfast all day. But we did not invent it to justify the menu. The reverse is true: the menu makes sense because we dislike the idea that a good meal must follow an administrative schedule.
Is breakfast, then, the most important meal of the day?
For some people, today, it might be. For others, it is not.
Far more useful is that the most important meal is whichever one you have just decided to eat well.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Breakfast at VERA →