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Grape Nuts was one of the first American cereal brands.
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It claimed it could steady a man's nerves and clear his brain.
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It could keep you cool in the summer.
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It was food for muscles.
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For "the warding off of disease."
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And for "men of brains."
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It was the "most scientific brain and nerve food in existence."
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These ads might seem ancient, but in connecting breakfast cereal with health, they aren't so different from how breakfast has been sold to us ever since.
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"Cheerios breakfast gives you the power protein."
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"How do I stay so slim?"
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"I watch what I eat, like Post Grape Nuts for breakfast."
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"Data shows women who eat breakfast tend to weigh less than those who don't."
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The problem with a lot of these claims is — they're not exactly true.
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But the idea of breakfast being good for health—especially weight loss—has persisted for over a century.
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So where does this myth come from?
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And what does this guy have to do with it?
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"For children there's pretty strong evidence that breakfast is a good idea."
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That's Julia Belluz who reports on health for Vox.
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"As an adult one of the most common claims we hear about breakfast is that it really promotes weight loss."
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And that idea didn't come out of nowhere.
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There's a whole body of research that connects breakfast with weight loss.
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But the methods behind a lot of those studies don't always hold up.
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Like this one, that found an association between eating breakfast, and having a low body mass index.
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That might be true, but studies like this aren't actually testing what would happen if you were to change your breakfast behavior.
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"The problem with those studies is that breakfast skippers and breakfast eaters are different people."
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"So maybe the breakfast eaters earn more money and exercise more and that explains why they weigh less than the breakfast skippers."
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Most of these studies also don't take into account a major factor: what we eat for breakfast.
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There's likely a big difference between eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, or a bowl of steel cut oats.
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There was even a study of studies that tried to answer the question: does our best research on breakfast prove that it helps with weight loss?
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"Researchers looked at 13 randomized controlled trials, the highest quality of evidence on breakfast and its effect on weight loss."
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When researchers looked at the studies, they found there's "no evidence to support the notion" that eating breakfast helps you lose weight.
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"And they found that breakfast might even had the opposite of the desired effect."
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"In some studies people actually gained a little bit of weight when they started to eat breakfast."
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So if the available science doesn't actually support this idea, why do we still believe eating breakfast is a healthier way to live?
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Well, it has a lot to do with these guys.
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Before they got into cereal, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg, ran a family business.
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The "Battle Creek Sanitarium."
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It was a wellness center, a place where the wealthy could go for what they called "biologic living".
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It included things like salt glow baths, light treatments, and strange looking exercise machines.
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It was there in 1898 that John Harvey came up with corn flakes, as a way to curb indigestion.
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But he was also an extremely religious doctor who believed masturbation was a carnal sin.
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And he prescribed a bland diet, including corn flakes, as part of the cure.
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In 1906, John Harvey's brother, Will Keith, took corn flakes, and mass-marketed them to the world.
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By 1917, Good Health, a magazine edited by John Harvey Kellogg, wrote "In many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
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With claims like this, cereal makers solidified the idea of a healthy breakfast.
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"It repairs and it sustains all body tissue."
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"It's part of your good breakfast."
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And today, a lot of the science cited in cereal commercials has a similar source.
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"Part of a good breakfast."
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Take a look at the small print on these studies.
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This one concludes breakfast skipping is not good for managing weight.
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It's funded by the Kellogg Company.
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And this one found breakfast skipping had other health costs — like high cholesterol.
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It's funded by another major breakfast maker, Quaker Oats.
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So, knowing all this about the slippery science of breakfast—should we still be eating it?
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There's little evidence that it's a great weight loss strategy, but that doesn't mean breakfast is bad.
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"For a lot of people breakfast isn't pointless."
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"It can be a good time of day to stock up on vitamins and nutrients."
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"But for the rest of us, it's up to you.”
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That means, if you're a breakfast eater, like Julia, you can carry on.
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And if you're a breakfast-skipper, like me?
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Don't worry, the best science we have suggests we're probably just fine either way.
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Thanks for watching.
