Not my comment but my guess is they might be referring to the research that shows that intermittent fasting has various health benefits. And one of the most popular ways to do intermittent fasting is 16:8 (16 hours where you fast, 8 hours where you eat), typically where you only ever eat from 12 noon until 8 in the evening, and then fast from 8 pm until noon the next day. Under those conditions, breaking the fast with a breakfast means losing out on the health benefits, and you're better off waiting until lunch.
But there's other research that, at least when it comes to weight loss, there is no measurable difference between intermittent fasting and reduced calorie intake.
1. Breakfast is the first meal of the day. It's in the name. It doesn't matter when breakfast happens on the wall clock, but it's always the first meal.
2. Dinner is the principal meal of the day. It might be the only meal meal, but it's most often one of two or more meals in a day. It doesn't matter when dinner happens -- it's dinner in the morning, at high noon, in the evening, and at 3:00AM. It's easily the most important meal, if measured by size.
3. Supper is the last meal of the day. It's final. It can happen any time of day, too, but there's no meals after supper so it's usually late in the day.
4. Lunch happens somewhere in the middle of a day. This is a purely time-based distinction.
5. Brunch is exactly like lunch is, but it's a mostly a menu-based distinction with a hint of some wall-clock dependency like lunch has. Brunch can include eggs that are served as eggs. (Lunch, usually not so much: With the addition of eggs, lunch ceases to be lunch and becomes brunch.)
---
In this way: A person can have a dinner of a big breakfast, skip lunch, and have supper later.
Or they can do the semi-normal breakfast, lunch, supper routine, with any of those meals serving as dinner. (Where I'm from, usually the last meal is the biggest -- but that's not universal at all.)
Or they can just eat once a day (semi-pro intermittent fasting), and that meal can be breakfast, dinner, and supper all at the same time. Maybe lunch, too, if it happens mid-day. (Maybe brunch instead of lunch, if it includes eggs.)
When a person has a light breakfast, a big lunch, and a bit of supper, then dinner happened at lunchtime.
It all fits.
Except: Skipping breakfast. That doesn't fit. The first meal is always breakfast. If any meals at all are eaten in a day, then one of them must be breakfast. (But breakfast doesn't have to happen in the morning, and it doesn't have to include any aspect of "breakfast food".)
It is important to chalange the spread of misinformation even when you don't have time to prove the correct information. If that statement was left unchallenged it would be seen as a tacit endorsment. The amount of effort you have to invest is proving that breakfast dosn't ward off tigers is disproportionate to the benefit.
that makes sense if other people are watching the conversation, paying attention to it, considering everything that's said and using that as the basis for what they believe going forward, but that almost never happens, and certainly never happens here.
"Conclusions: This meta-analysis confirmed that skipping breakfast is associated with overweight/obesity, and skipping breakfast increases the risk of overweight/obesity. The results of cohort studies and cross-sectional studies are consistent. There is no significant difference in these results among different ages, gender, regions, and economic conditions."
There is some evidence that moving your meals to early in the day is good for you. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.
Horses for courses though. I know plenty of people who don't eat breakfast but personally I found it much easier to not eat dinner.
In the context of hotel buffet food service waste, it definitely is.
And if what you’re really trying to say is that you like intermittent fasting (which can have eating windows at any part of the day even if the meme is to start eating at traditional lunch hours) the first meal, that meal which breaks your fast, is, by definition, breakfast. This could be your only meal if taking intermittent fasting to its extreme - further evidence for it being most important.
The other way in which breakfast is most important, IMO, is that it sets the tone for the rest of the day. To be more specific, the first meal that gets you onto the blood sugar/insulin rollercoaster will keep you on the rollercoaster all day until you fast again - so the quality of your meals (aka not starting your day with sugar bombs) is highly important.
Regardless, “important” is purely an opinion/values statement; the only error is claiming that a sincerely held opinion is an “error”.
Edit: after some recent travel experiences, I found that starting my day with a high quality salad (little dressing, whole fish, variety of vegetables, small portion) was transformative in keeping my blood sugar under control, maintaining stable energy level, and promoting healthy digestion.
seriosuly underrated comment. I finished a 20 min bike ride and feel clear headed. Havent' consumed anything other than black coffee. Most people are so used to eating continuously and never train their bodies to be metabolically flexible. Doesn't help that the "most important meal of the day" shtick was invented by cereal companies trying to sell us crap dessert masquerading as health food.
Same routine here. I can ride on that until lunch and I learned this during my (few) years in Italy, because it's normal there.
Also there was a brief moment in my adult life when I had sleep for supper and it was the first time in years when I heard my stomach actually rumbling - I was so used to eating at the first sign of cravings that I forgot how it feels.
You get delivered e.g 5 meals day before, evening for next day
Healthly food, calculated calories, good stuff in general.
When you are living alone then it is really good option because when I calculated my shopping costs then switching to it wasnt more expensive and im eating way better while saving time
I'm guessing those Meals in Boxes as a Service you can subscribe to, where they drop a bunch of calorically deficient, bland, starvation-level meal packs at your doorstep in the middle of the night, and you're supposed to survive on them for the next 24 hours.
> Or, maybe, don’t: when people do, they take much more than they eat. Compared with ordering from the menu, all-you-can-eat breakfasts waste more food—up to twice as much, according to one study.
Is that a cultural thing? We have pretty much zero food waste on any buffet as you can easily only take what you actually want to eat. It's just basic good education to be considerate with resources, especially food resources - and I rarely see people taking more than they actually eat, so it's not just an "our family" thing. If you do throw away a lot of foot on a buffet you're just an inconsiderate asshole - and if a restaurant location has significant food waste from that they should just start charging for leftovers.
It's paywalled so I didn't read more than the first paragraph. But maybe the waste comes from overestimation of the amount of food to produce? Even if everyone eats a perfect portion for themselves, if you overestimate the total then you'll have food waste if the food can't be preserved.
> Even if everyone eats a perfect portion for themselves, if you overestimate the total then you'll have food waste if the food can't be preserved.
That'd be just poor planning on part of the hotel/restaurant. It'd be a valid excuse when starting new, but after a few weeks that should be under control.
If you only do breakfast buffets it's a bit harder - but you monitor the situation, and as breakfast time approaches the end you reduce things you can't store or re-use otherwise. Pretty much any hotel I've been to in the last few years had that kind of items run out without restocking them when we had a late breakfast.
If you also do lunch/dinner buffets you have some more options, and can have some dishes reusing the leftovers. I've also seen that regularly - they had the planned dishes, and a few smaller pots with something they came up with to reuse whatever was left over.
I was surprised that this article is about food wasted by people not finishing their plates. Would have guessed that a lot of the unserved food is discarded (sure, some of it can be served at tomorrow's breakfast, but only within limits), and that this is much more significant.
The implied problem: People waste too much food at hotel breakfast buffets.
The work: Some people made a model (that itself is devoid of actual hotels, food, and people altogether, as well lacking validation) that let them wiggle some parameters and see if waste changed in that simulation.
The proposed solution: There isn't one. It's just dogshit.
We can learn roughly as much about how consumption and waste and profitability work in the real world by playing Roller Coaster Tycoon.
I was reading this thinking "wait, did anyone actually eat food? Is any of this real?", but sounds like we took away something similar. I don't get it. I was thinking even if the buffet were virtual, maybe they could give real people real plates, and a menu, and they'd load up from the virtual buffet, which would actually be people cooking for each order or similar. No signs that they did that, though.
Toast, eggs, sausages, tomato, mushrooms and most of the other things are dirt cheap. Bacons a bit more expensive but I doubt that ever has any left over.
May be still cheap in the US but in the UK all this almost 2x more expensive than before COVID while salaries nowhere near 2x higher. It's a small fraction of cost of saying in a hotel but not a negligible one.
I live in Ukraine, and we have very small salaries, but at the same time food is expensive, as well as electricity, gas, and medical treatment. Pensioners receive a pension of only $70, and I don’t know how they even survive under such conditions. This is even lower than the minimum subsistence level. And God forbid you need surgery — when you come to the hospital, they tell you how much it costs, and if you don’t have the money, they say: go die, nobody needs you.
I've long disliked all the "nudge" hype that was prevalent 10 years ago, but what really sent me over the edge was the "if books could kill" podcast episode about it [0]
It's incredible how this stuff even made its way into the Obama administration.
What? It's a buffet, of course you can eat as much as you want. The point is stopping people from wasting food though. Surely you don't mean you'll fill two plates just out of spite and not eat everything you took?
Honestly I'm very confused why this is even a problem. If people in general had even a modicum of rationality buffets would be the least wasteful way of serving food, compared to fixed-size portions.
If hotels do a virtual buffet and other nonsense I'll just opt out and grab some bits from a local supermarket, which I imagine is what they really would like - to eliminate breakfast entirely.
Just like making room service opt in - they can claim it's available but obviously a lot of people just don't bother because they pick up on the signal from the hotel that they don't want to do it
Personally I've never seen wasteful people at breakfast buffets in the UK. Greedy yes but not plates of unfinished food.
It's also good to remember how much breakfast regularly costs now. £15-20 is quite common at mid range places - £10 of yesteryear is exceedingly rare
When I traveled to Spain, I had a layover in London on the way in and the way out. So I had a bit of time to sample the local cuisine.
Straight off the plane at Gatwick, I boarded a train into London, and ended up at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen, which was some kind of import from New Zealand and had some decent grub.
On the way home I had an overnight layover, and I stayed in a rather nice hotel in Westminster. The staff was Eastern European Slavs. I asked about places to eat, and it turned out that the entire street offered restaurants, so I grabbed some fish & chips and a ginger beer, and some fruit from a convenience store.
In the morning, the hotel offered a "continental breakfast" as we call it in the States, so it was complimentary and basically all-you-can-eat.
It featured delicious fare and was quite satisfying. There was melon and cereal and milk to drink and tea. I was happy with that and it was a a good send-off before the airport. I am very thankful for meals like that, which are included in the cost of the hotel room, because it definitely saves time and expenses from going to find a restaurant.
>
It's also good to remember how much breakfast regularly costs now. £15-20 is quite common at mid range places - £10 of yesteryear is exceedingly rare
There exist hotels where breakfast is still very cheap (but the rooms are accordingly more expensive). The reason is that business travelers, the budgets for meals are really tight (you have to pay anything above by yourself), but the maximum allowed costs for hotel rooms are typically much less tight.
To accommodate such business travelers (though these are not the only guests), the hotel makes the breakfast really cheap, but the room accordingly more expensive (but still within the typical budget of business travelers), so that such customers can deduct more travel expenses to the employer.
Doesn't make any sense since most people have eyes and a nose. I've never been so surprised about the quality of the food that I felt inclined to leave it on the plate. But if you're a picky eater and unsure whether you'll like something, perhaps start with a small amount to try it?
Right! The only time I leave food is when it's inedible (or the scrambled eggs fooled me again, looking fresh when they're powdered. It's not 1945 so I tend not to eat powdered foods)
> BREAKFAST IS THE most important meal of the day
First sentence of the article and already an error.
OK fine but it's not really helpful to us reading your comment if you also don't back up your counter claim.
Not my comment but my guess is they might be referring to the research that shows that intermittent fasting has various health benefits. And one of the most popular ways to do intermittent fasting is 16:8 (16 hours where you fast, 8 hours where you eat), typically where you only ever eat from 12 noon until 8 in the evening, and then fast from 8 pm until noon the next day. Under those conditions, breaking the fast with a breakfast means losing out on the health benefits, and you're better off waiting until lunch.
But there's other research that, at least when it comes to weight loss, there is no measurable difference between intermittent fasting and reduced calorie intake.
I think the main point of intermittent fasting is to help with diabetes prevention
Of all the Internet hype around it, including many threads here, not once I saw anyone actually spelling this out.
brunch is the most important meal of the day, I guess.
Perhaps.
I break it down like this:
1. Breakfast is the first meal of the day. It's in the name. It doesn't matter when breakfast happens on the wall clock, but it's always the first meal.
2. Dinner is the principal meal of the day. It might be the only meal meal, but it's most often one of two or more meals in a day. It doesn't matter when dinner happens -- it's dinner in the morning, at high noon, in the evening, and at 3:00AM. It's easily the most important meal, if measured by size.
3. Supper is the last meal of the day. It's final. It can happen any time of day, too, but there's no meals after supper so it's usually late in the day.
4. Lunch happens somewhere in the middle of a day. This is a purely time-based distinction.
5. Brunch is exactly like lunch is, but it's a mostly a menu-based distinction with a hint of some wall-clock dependency like lunch has. Brunch can include eggs that are served as eggs. (Lunch, usually not so much: With the addition of eggs, lunch ceases to be lunch and becomes brunch.)
---
In this way: A person can have a dinner of a big breakfast, skip lunch, and have supper later.
Or they can do the semi-normal breakfast, lunch, supper routine, with any of those meals serving as dinner. (Where I'm from, usually the last meal is the biggest -- but that's not universal at all.)
Or they can just eat once a day (semi-pro intermittent fasting), and that meal can be breakfast, dinner, and supper all at the same time. Maybe lunch, too, if it happens mid-day. (Maybe brunch instead of lunch, if it includes eggs.)
When a person has a light breakfast, a big lunch, and a bit of supper, then dinner happened at lunchtime.
It all fits.
Except: Skipping breakfast. That doesn't fit. The first meal is always breakfast. If any meals at all are eaten in a day, then one of them must be breakfast. (But breakfast doesn't have to happen in the morning, and it doesn't have to include any aspect of "breakfast food".)
But what about second breakfast?
That which can be asserted with no evidence can be dismissed with no evidence.
but at some point someone should bring some evidence, or the exchange is pointless.
not when the entire conversation has nothing to do with anything.
Welcome to Hacker News?
No it can’t.
It is important to chalange the spread of misinformation even when you don't have time to prove the correct information. If that statement was left unchallenged it would be seen as a tacit endorsment. The amount of effort you have to invest is proving that breakfast dosn't ward off tigers is disproportionate to the benefit.
that makes sense if other people are watching the conversation, paying attention to it, considering everything that's said and using that as the basis for what they believe going forward, but that almost never happens, and certainly never happens here.
"Conclusions: This meta-analysis confirmed that skipping breakfast is associated with overweight/obesity, and skipping breakfast increases the risk of overweight/obesity. The results of cohort studies and cross-sectional studies are consistent. There is no significant difference in these results among different ages, gender, regions, and economic conditions."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31918985/
There is some evidence that moving your meals to early in the day is good for you. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.
Horses for courses though. I know plenty of people who don't eat breakfast but personally I found it much easier to not eat dinner.
In the context of hotel buffet food service waste, it definitely is.
And if what you’re really trying to say is that you like intermittent fasting (which can have eating windows at any part of the day even if the meme is to start eating at traditional lunch hours) the first meal, that meal which breaks your fast, is, by definition, breakfast. This could be your only meal if taking intermittent fasting to its extreme - further evidence for it being most important.
The other way in which breakfast is most important, IMO, is that it sets the tone for the rest of the day. To be more specific, the first meal that gets you onto the blood sugar/insulin rollercoaster will keep you on the rollercoaster all day until you fast again - so the quality of your meals (aka not starting your day with sugar bombs) is highly important.
Regardless, “important” is purely an opinion/values statement; the only error is claiming that a sincerely held opinion is an “error”.
Edit: after some recent travel experiences, I found that starting my day with a high quality salad (little dressing, whole fish, variety of vegetables, small portion) was transformative in keeping my blood sugar under control, maintaining stable energy level, and promoting healthy digestion.
seriosuly underrated comment. I finished a 20 min bike ride and feel clear headed. Havent' consumed anything other than black coffee. Most people are so used to eating continuously and never train their bodies to be metabolically flexible. Doesn't help that the "most important meal of the day" shtick was invented by cereal companies trying to sell us crap dessert masquerading as health food.
Same routine here. I can ride on that until lunch and I learned this during my (few) years in Italy, because it's normal there.
Also there was a brief moment in my adult life when I had sleep for supper and it was the first time in years when I heard my stomach actually rumbling - I was so used to eating at the first sign of cravings that I forgot how it feels.
Counterpoint:
Ive almost never been eating breakfasts and when I went on delivery diet and started eating them then ive been feeling better tbh
What is delivery diet?
You get delivered e.g 5 meals day before, evening for next day
Healthly food, calculated calories, good stuff in general.
When you are living alone then it is really good option because when I calculated my shopping costs then switching to it wasnt more expensive and im eating way better while saving time
I'm guessing those Meals in Boxes as a Service you can subscribe to, where they drop a bunch of calorically deficient, bland, starvation-level meal packs at your doorstep in the middle of the night, and you're supposed to survive on them for the next 24 hours.
I wouldnt call them starvation level, after all you select the size/calories
[dead]
https://archive.is/eRiYf
> Or, maybe, don’t: when people do, they take much more than they eat. Compared with ordering from the menu, all-you-can-eat breakfasts waste more food—up to twice as much, according to one study.
Is that a cultural thing? We have pretty much zero food waste on any buffet as you can easily only take what you actually want to eat. It's just basic good education to be considerate with resources, especially food resources - and I rarely see people taking more than they actually eat, so it's not just an "our family" thing. If you do throw away a lot of foot on a buffet you're just an inconsiderate asshole - and if a restaurant location has significant food waste from that they should just start charging for leftovers.
It's paywalled so I didn't read more than the first paragraph. But maybe the waste comes from overestimation of the amount of food to produce? Even if everyone eats a perfect portion for themselves, if you overestimate the total then you'll have food waste if the food can't be preserved.
> Even if everyone eats a perfect portion for themselves, if you overestimate the total then you'll have food waste if the food can't be preserved.
That'd be just poor planning on part of the hotel/restaurant. It'd be a valid excuse when starting new, but after a few weeks that should be under control.
If you only do breakfast buffets it's a bit harder - but you monitor the situation, and as breakfast time approaches the end you reduce things you can't store or re-use otherwise. Pretty much any hotel I've been to in the last few years had that kind of items run out without restocking them when we had a late breakfast.
If you also do lunch/dinner buffets you have some more options, and can have some dishes reusing the leftovers. I've also seen that regularly - they had the planned dishes, and a few smaller pots with something they came up with to reuse whatever was left over.
They make a distinction between plate waste which was served then trashed and total food waste. Plate waste is roughly a third apparently.
I was surprised that this article is about food wasted by people not finishing their plates. Would have guessed that a lot of the unserved food is discarded (sure, some of it can be served at tomorrow's breakfast, but only within limits), and that this is much more significant.
Plate waste is roughly a third of total food waste apparently.
This article is dogshit.
The implied problem: People waste too much food at hotel breakfast buffets.
The work: Some people made a model (that itself is devoid of actual hotels, food, and people altogether, as well lacking validation) that let them wiggle some parameters and see if waste changed in that simulation.
The proposed solution: There isn't one. It's just dogshit.
We can learn roughly as much about how consumption and waste and profitability work in the real world by playing Roller Coaster Tycoon.
I was reading this thinking "wait, did anyone actually eat food? Is any of this real?", but sounds like we took away something similar. I don't get it. I was thinking even if the buffet were virtual, maybe they could give real people real plates, and a menu, and they'd load up from the virtual buffet, which would actually be people cooking for each order or similar. No signs that they did that, though.
Toast, eggs, sausages, tomato, mushrooms and most of the other things are dirt cheap. Bacons a bit more expensive but I doubt that ever has any left over.
May be still cheap in the US but in the UK all this almost 2x more expensive than before COVID while salaries nowhere near 2x higher. It's a small fraction of cost of saying in a hotel but not a negligible one.
I live in Ukraine, and we have very small salaries, but at the same time food is expensive, as well as electricity, gas, and medical treatment. Pensioners receive a pension of only $70, and I don’t know how they even survive under such conditions. This is even lower than the minimum subsistence level. And God forbid you need surgery — when you come to the hospital, they tell you how much it costs, and if you don’t have the money, they say: go die, nobody needs you.
https://archive.is/eRiYf
Nudge theory. Applied to my favourite meal of the day. Gaaah. I think I'll simply fill two plates now. Or maybe 3.
I've long disliked all the "nudge" hype that was prevalent 10 years ago, but what really sent me over the edge was the "if books could kill" podcast episode about it [0]
It's incredible how this stuff even made its way into the Obama administration.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjArvN9cfgE, or on Spotify or Apple podcasts
What? It's a buffet, of course you can eat as much as you want. The point is stopping people from wasting food though. Surely you don't mean you'll fill two plates just out of spite and not eat everything you took?
Honestly I'm very confused why this is even a problem. If people in general had even a modicum of rationality buffets would be the least wasteful way of serving food, compared to fixed-size portions.
If hotels do a virtual buffet and other nonsense I'll just opt out and grab some bits from a local supermarket, which I imagine is what they really would like - to eliminate breakfast entirely.
Just like making room service opt in - they can claim it's available but obviously a lot of people just don't bother because they pick up on the signal from the hotel that they don't want to do it
Personally I've never seen wasteful people at breakfast buffets in the UK. Greedy yes but not plates of unfinished food.
It's also good to remember how much breakfast regularly costs now. £15-20 is quite common at mid range places - £10 of yesteryear is exceedingly rare
When I traveled to Spain, I had a layover in London on the way in and the way out. So I had a bit of time to sample the local cuisine.
Straight off the plane at Gatwick, I boarded a train into London, and ended up at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen, which was some kind of import from New Zealand and had some decent grub.
On the way home I had an overnight layover, and I stayed in a rather nice hotel in Westminster. The staff was Eastern European Slavs. I asked about places to eat, and it turned out that the entire street offered restaurants, so I grabbed some fish & chips and a ginger beer, and some fruit from a convenience store.
In the morning, the hotel offered a "continental breakfast" as we call it in the States, so it was complimentary and basically all-you-can-eat.
It featured delicious fare and was quite satisfying. There was melon and cereal and milk to drink and tea. I was happy with that and it was a a good send-off before the airport. I am very thankful for meals like that, which are included in the cost of the hotel room, because it definitely saves time and expenses from going to find a restaurant.
I don't understand how this relates to the article or the discussion.
> It's also good to remember how much breakfast regularly costs now. £15-20 is quite common at mid range places - £10 of yesteryear is exceedingly rare
There exist hotels where breakfast is still very cheap (but the rooms are accordingly more expensive). The reason is that business travelers, the budgets for meals are really tight (you have to pay anything above by yourself), but the maximum allowed costs for hotel rooms are typically much less tight.
To accommodate such business travelers (though these are not the only guests), the hotel makes the breakfast really cheap, but the room accordingly more expensive (but still within the typical budget of business travelers), so that such customers can deduct more travel expenses to the employer.
They did a "virtual" buffet to model behavior, nobody said anything about hotels "doing a virtual buffet"?
Staying in hotels is wasteful, to start with. Buen Camino.
[dead]
Here's an idea: provide better food. That way people won't want to leave it on the plate.
Doesn't make any sense since most people have eyes and a nose. I've never been so surprised about the quality of the food that I felt inclined to leave it on the plate. But if you're a picky eater and unsure whether you'll like something, perhaps start with a small amount to try it?
Right! The only time I leave food is when it's inedible (or the scrambled eggs fooled me again, looking fresh when they're powdered. It's not 1945 so I tend not to eat powdered foods)
Which is unfortunately more common