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Premieres 21 October 2026 at 7:30pm UK time
Who's Tricking You? · Episode 3
Who said breakfast is the most important meal?
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day... says who?
A cereal-making doctor's health magazine coined the line in 1917. Then a publicist working for a bacon company asked thousands of doctors one question, and the papers did the rest.
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What the fox said
Who decided breakfast is the most important meal of the day?
Not your mother. A man selling cereal.
Michigan, the 1890s. Doctor John Harvey Kellogg runs a health sanitarium, and feeds his patients plain flakes of corn.
His brother Will adds sugar, and starts a company. Cornflakes go on sale to the whole country.
In 1917, a health magazine run by Doctor Kellogg prints the line: breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Then the bacon men want in.
In the 1920s, a bacon company hires a publicist called Edward Bernays.
He asks thousands of doctors one question: is a hearty breakfast better than a light one? Most of them say yes.
The newspapers run it. Doctors urge bacon and eggs. And sales go up.
Nobody had tested anything. They had simply asked.
Today, proper trials find breakfast is no magic trick. Eat it if you're hungry. Skip it if you're not.
So when a slogan sounds like science, ask who paid for the sentence. Keep your nose to the wind.
Sources
- The phrase 'breakfast is the most important meal of the day' appears in a 1917 article by Lenna F. Cooper in Good Health, a magazine edited by John Harvey Kellogg (Good Health magazine, 1917).
- In the 1920s publicist Edward Bernays, working for the bacon producer Beech-Nut Packing, surveyed doctors, about 4,500 of whom agreed a heavy breakfast was better; newspapers then reported doctors urging bacon and eggs (Edward Bernays's own account).
- A 2019 meta-analysis of trials found that eating breakfast does not help with weight loss (BMJ meta-analysis, 2019).
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