By Sarah Klein

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/breakfast-most-important-history_n_5910054

"In many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started," Lenna F. Cooper, B.S., writes in a 1917 issue of Good Health, the self-proclaimed "oldest health magazine in the world" edited by none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the co-inventor of flaked cereal.

Cereal, despite slipping in popularity from its 1990s peak, still raked in around $10 billion in sales in 2013, the New York Times recently reported.

A morning meal has, of course, been eaten for ages. Still, it was once associated with gluttony, says Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland, Oregon-based plant ecologist and food writer, and the author of Breakfast: A History.

With the Industrial Revolution came a reduction in the energy people needed to complete their daily tasks, says Arndt Anderson, but they were still eating "whatever they could find" for breakfast, whether it was last night's leftovers or just some bread and cheese.

Bacon and eggs -- still very much in vogue, obviously -- at least cut back on increasingly sugary cereals and offered some additional protein.

Aside from staying fuller for longer, regular breakfast eaters are typically thought to benefit from a host of other health gains. A 2012 study found that men who skipped breakfast had a 21 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes than men who ate breakfast. Women who ate breakfast irregularly also showed a higher risk of type 2 diabetes than women who ate every morning, according to a 2013 study (although body mass index may explain some of the risk). In a 2013 study, men who skipped breakfast were found to have a 27 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease.

Still, recent research calls into question just how powerful eating breakfast really is, particularly when it comes to weight loss -- so who is right?

In a 2013 review of the existing research, Brown and his colleagues couldn't find a causal link between breakfast habits and obesity, but noted that research boasting potential weight loss benefits from eating breakfast remains in good favor.

"When somebody says breakfast, what do they mean?" says Brown. "Does it have to be [a specific time] after waking up?

"Based on limited research, I would recommend a breakfast composed of a whole grain, fruit/veg, and a protein source," she writes. "For example, a bowl of steel-cut oats with chopped fruit and nuts."