Is Breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

Day 149 / 365

A few days back I was reading a Reddit thread about popular myths that were spread amongst the public through propaganda. One of those was that carrots help you improve your vision. I was shocked to find that it was a myth as it was something I was told as a child and I had heard several people say that since.

The story behind the carrot myth was that during World War 2, the nations involved had a shortage of food supplies, amongst other things. Britain dealt with this by spreading this rumor amongst their people. The carrot was a crop which was very cheaply and abundantly available there, so they wanted people to consume more carrots. And it surely worked like a charm.

People in marketing have been using such strategies for a long time.

James Caleb Jackson and John Harvey Kellogg, the guys who pioneered the breakfast cereal, wanted to spread similar myths to boost their sales. And the one they went with was “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. They had no research to back it up, they just were hoping people believed it and that it lead to them buying more cereal.

Other industries that were involved with breakfast, like the bacon industry, jumped on the bandwagon as well. And it caught on.

Now you may have read studies about it, you may have heard experts speak about how breakfast should be the most important thing you eat and what not. But it’s important to know the whole story. It’s important to know how it all started. The rest is up to you, whoever you might wanna believe.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The 4 stages of a habit