" This habit has forced me to be subjected to more lectures on how I’m hurting myself, my diet, my work and my health than almost any other. Only a fool would skip the most important meal of the day, right?

As with many other nutritional pieces of advice, our belief in the power of breakfast is based on misinterpreted research and biased studies. "

> Goes on to cite 2013 studies being wrong

> Implies that "Our belief in the power of breakfast" dates to 2013

> Ignores the fact that our belief in the power of breakfast dates back to people like JR Kellog, 19th century food industrialist, 7th Day Adventist, and superintendant of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. One of the time's foremost authorities on health for the rich and famous, whom he lectured on the poison of meat & alcohol consumption and the ungodly plague of masturbation & orgasm, a guaranteed path to every disease known to man. He gave us calisthenics, grain-based breakfast, and also circumcision (though his clitorectomy and wire-based male chastity surgery did not catch on) based on his religious intuitions (stemming from the prophetic visions of Ellen G Wright) and social mores. Which were not, per se, peer reviewed to modern standards. They were marketed to consumers and the devout in an age of literal snake oil salesmen, in an era when doctors had a laughable corpus of knowledge. An impressive man, but scientists really do need to remember to cite the source of the ideas they are testing, not merely the latest attempt to validate those ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqDhT3OIEI8

https://archive.org/details/biologiclivingr00kellgoog

http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cere...

Take something we already seem to want to believe, eg, "MSG is bad for you", and subject that sort of vague proposition to a battery of independent tests run by publication-biased or funding-biased researchers with a diversity of different levels of scientific rigor & statistical literacy, and you will always find some studies that pan out and prove the thing the scientists wanted to prove. Dietary research is extremely hard, because we can't keep humans caged in a controlled environment, and researchers rarely get a thousandth of the funding they would need to really legitimately demonstrate the principle they're poking at.

The fact that there's no scientific basis for the observation, that the observation, if you chase it down, is a single anecdote of one guy eating salty food, that many other foods contain MSG, that the only reason it is being investigated is literally that it's the subject of rumors... these things have real weight on the chances that a study has produced a meaningful result and not merely some mistake or uncorrected correlation that the writers & peer review failed to catch.

For things we already seem to want to believe whose only source of funding is a commercial entity... there is nearly zero epistemological significance to a study saying what they want it to say. Outside of the large group of things they might do to sway the results, they get to pick and choose which studies to publicize; A breakfast cereal company funding a study with perfect experimental design and perfectly honest researchers can merely publicize the one study out of twenty that reached statistical significance at p=0.05.