Breakfast and Mental Health
If you’ve worked with me, you’ll know that I ask people about their usual eating habits and one important one in particular - breakfast!
The concept of intermittent fasting has gained a lot of media attention and research. This involves limiting the amount of time in a day that a person eats, while the remaining hours are spent fasting. One common example is 16/8 where a person eats for 8 hours of the day, say 11am to 7pm, and then stops eating until the following day at 11am. There is an abundance of evidence emerging that suggests that this style of eating can be helpful for a range of outcomes including weight loss (1) and improved diabetes (2).
But how does this connect with mental health? While you could technically create your 8 hour eating window any time of day, most often, people are skipping breakfast and having lunch and dinner when they follow this eating plan. And while this might help with certain health outcomes, mental health might not be one of them.
A recent meta-analysis (3) looked at all of the existing data on the relationship between breakfast consumption and mental health. They found that skipping breakfast was associated with a range of negative outcomes including higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety (among adolescents). While observational evidence has many limitations, I can attest that in my 12 years of clinical experience, I have seen a similar pattern. Among my patients, people who are prone to anxiety or depression seem to benefit from eating a morning meal. Eating in the morning, particularly a balanced meal that will promote balanced blood sugar, sets people up for feeling more balanced emotionally. When we get hungry (or should I say hangry?) our emotions are impacted. The symptoms of low blood sugar overlap very significantly with the symptoms of anxiety. Early in my career I published a case report (4) in the scientific literature about a young woman who came to see me. When we improved her blood sugar balance throughout the day, her anxiety dramatically improved. This case has inspired some of my more recent work, including a clinical trial where we delivered a dietary intervention aimed at preventing low blood sugar for people with generalized anxiety disorder (5).
Diet is complex! The diet changes that might help some conditions, might worsen others. If you are looking to modify your diet to support mental health, I’d be happy to partner with you!
References
1. Yao K, Su H, Cui K, Gao Y, Xu D, Wang Q, Ha Z, Zhang T, Chen S, Liu T. Effectiveness of an intermittent fasting diet versus regular diet on fat loss in overweight and obese middle-aged and elderly people without metabolic disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. J Nutr Health Aging. 2024 Mar;28(3):100165. doi: 10.1016/j.jnha.2024.100165. Epub 2024 Feb 2. PMID: 38308923.
2. Circadian alignment of food intake and glycaemic control by time-restricted eating: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Rev Endocr Metab Disord. 2024 Apr;25(2):325-337. doi: 10.1007/s11154-023-09853-x. Epub 2023 Nov 22. PMID: 37993559; PMCID: PMC10943166
3. Zahedi H, Djalalinia S, Sadeghi O, Zare Garizi F, Asayesh H, Payab M, Zarei M, Qorbani M. Breakfast consumption and mental health: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. Nutr Neurosci. 2022 Jun;25(6):1250-1264. doi: 10.1080/1028415X.2020.1853411. Epub 2020 Dec 14. PMID: 33314992.
4. Aucoin M, Bhardwaj S. Generalized anxiety disorder and hypoglycemia symptoms improved with diet modification. Case reports in psychiatry. 2016;2016(1):7165425.
5. Aucoin M, LaChance L, van der Wurff I, Miller S, Naidoo U, Jenkins A, Cooley K. Dietary counselling plus omega-3 supplementation in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder: protocol for a randomized wait-list controlled pilot trial (the “EASe-GAD Trial”). Pilot and feasibility studies. 2023 Nov 10;9(1):186.