🧠 Fact or Fiction: Breakfast is the Most Important Meal of the Day?

Today’s Edition of Captivated: Fact or Fiction: Breakfast is the Most Important Meal of the Day?: The Psychology Behind What Makes Us Believe

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” …

Skip breakfast and feel guilty about it?

Maybe you’ve heard skipping it slows your metabolism or makes you less productive.

Maybe you've heard it's the most important meal of the day ...

But what if this is a myth, and that guilt isn’t about nutrition at all… but a carefully engineered marketing play using psychology and brain science?...

(continues below).

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🧭 INSIDE THIS EDITION

• The Breakfast Club

• Smart (& Free) Tool You Can Use #1

• Did You Know?

• Hooked

• The Psychology Behind It

• Steal this Strategy for Yourself

• Smart (& Free) Tool You Can Use #2

• tl;dr

• Smart (& Free) Tool You Can Use #3

📈 DID YOU KNOW?

84.4% of U.S. adults eat breakfast on any given day.

🤔

 .. HOOKED: How They Made You Believe It ..

If you grew up thinking "breakfast is the most important meal of the day," you weren’t alone...

But that belief didn’t come from ancient wisdom... it came from a cereal box and a well-funded marketing campaign.

It started in 1917, when dietitian Lenna F. Cooper wrote in Good Health magazine that breakfast was crucial for energy.

The catch? That magazine was backed by Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by John Harvey Kellogg -- yep, that Kellogg, the guy selling cornflakes.

While this belief started to gain traction, the real marketing magic happened in 1944, when General Foods ran a campaign for Grape-Nuts cereal with the slogan: “Eat a Good Breakfast - Do a Better Job.” 

The food industry saw an opportunity. They needed to sell more cereal, so they tapped into one of the most powerful forces in consumer psychology: habit formation.

They shifted from selling cereal to selling the idea that skipping breakfast meant underperforming at work, struggling at school, and running on empty all day.

To make it stick, they:

• Funded "expert" opinions to give the claim credibility.

• Placed strategic ads in parenting & health magazines to target families.

• Used authority bias: people trust experts, even when those experts are funded by brands.

It worked. Schools pushed breakfast for better learning. Doctors started recommending it. Government food guidelines reinforced it.

And just like that, breakfast became more than a meal, and skipping it felt less like a personal choice… and more like a terrible mistake.

Fast forward a few decades, and it’s no surprise that today, many people accept the phrase “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” as scientific fact, even though there’s no universal evidence to back it up.

Research shows that how important breakfast is actually depends on the person - it’s different for everyone based on lifestyle, goals, and what works for you.

🧠

 .. The Psychology Behind It ..

What makes a simple phrase like "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" turn into a global belief? A mix of habit loops, exposure, fear-based persuasion, and identity reinforcement, all backed by psychology.

1. 🧠 Habit Loops: Create a Cue-Craving-Reward Cycle

Wonder why your morning routine feels automatic: wake up, brush your teeth, shower?

Or why grabbing a morning coffee just feels right?

That’s a habit loop in action: our brains love predictable patterns.

Breakfast marketers hijacked habit formation by making breakfast feel like an automatic part of waking up. Here’s how they did it:

• Cue: You wake up feeling sluggish.

• Craving: The desire for energy and alertness.

• Behavior: Eat a quick, sugary breakfast (hello, cereal).

• Reward: A temporary energy boost, reinforced by ads.

Sound familiar? It’s the same loop behind:

☕️ Morning coffee – Cue: Tired → Craving: Wake up → Behavior: Drink coffee → Reward: Alertness.

📱 Checking your phone – Cue: Boredom → Craving: Stimulation → Behavior: Scroll → Reward: Dopamine hit.

Once a habit loop is formed, it’s hard to break, and that’s exactly why food companies wanted breakfast baked into your routine.

2. 🧠 The Mere Exposure Effect: Familiarity Breeds Belief

Notice how things feel more true just because you’ve heard them a lot? That’s the mere exposure effect: the brain’s tendency to favor things it’s repeatedly exposed to.

Think about it, if I say, “The best part of waking up…” chances are, your brain automatically fills in “…is Folgers in your cup.” That’s the mere exposure effect in action. Even if you don’t drink Folgers, the message stuck.

Breakfast companies didn’t just market their products, they saturated every possible channel — radio, tv, magazines, school programs, newspapers — with the same message.

Just like that, breakfast became “essential” simply because people heard it so many times.

Hearing “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” over and over made it feel like common knowledge, even without real scientific backing.

3. 🧠 The Fear Factor: Loss Aversion at Play

People are more motivated to avoid losses than to seek gains. The breakfast industry didn’t just promote the benefits of eating in the morning, it framed skipping breakfast as a risk:

❌ "Skipping breakfast will make you gain weight."

❌ "Your kids need breakfast for brain development."

❌ "You’ll be sluggish at work if you don't eat in the morning."

By triggering loss aversion, the messaging made skipping breakfast feel like a mistake no one wanted to make.

4. 🧠 Identity & Social Proof: If Everyone Believes It, It Must Be True

Social validation is one of the strongest psychological drivers. Once a behavior becomes socially ingrained, opting out feels unnatural:

• Doctors recommended breakfast.

• Schools provided breakfast programs.

• Successful professionals and athletes were shown eating breakfast.

People don’t want to feel left out or like they’re making a bad decision, so breakfast became a social norm.

🥷

 .. Steal this Strategy for Yourself ..

1 - Make Your Product or Service the 'Default' Choice:

• Repeat your message across multiple touch points until it feels like common knowledge.

• Use trusted sources or experts to reinforce your claim.

• Frame alternatives as outdated, inefficient, or risky.

2 - Tap Into Loss Aversion: 

• Frame not using your product as a risk rather than a missed benefit.

• Use warnings like “Don’t get left behind” or “Without this, you’ll lose X.”

• Show customers what they miss out on if they don’t take action.

3 - Create an Identity Around Your Offering:

• Align your product with a desirable identity (e.g., “Smart marketers use X”).

• Build a sense of belonging by reinforcing social proof (“Over 10,000 people already use this”).

• Give customers a name or identity that makes them feel like they belong (e.g., “Nike Run Club,” “Notion Pros,” “The Shopify Founder Community”).

4 - Reinforce the Habit Loop: 

• Make using your product part of a customer’s daily routine.

• Use triggers that remind them to come back (emails, push notifications).

• Create a mini reward system that reinforces ongoing use.

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✌️ 

 .. tl;dr & captivated wrap-up ..

Breakfast isn’t universally the most important meal of the day, but cereal companies sure wanted you to think it was.

They sell a belief system, using:

• Habit Loops – They linked breakfast to energy and productivity, making it feel necessary like your morning coffee.

• Mere Exposure Effect – Repeating the message everywhere until it felt like common knowledge.

• Loss Aversion – Framing skipping breakfast as dangerous to your health, job, and kids’ futures.

• Social Proof – If doctors, schools, and successful people ate breakfast, skipping it had to be wrong, right?

Turns out, science disagrees. The allure of breakfast is just a well-marketed idea that taps into psychology.

And you can use these same psychology principles to captivate your users, customers and clients.

The next time you hear a phrase that sounds like a universal truth, ask yourself: Who benefits from me believing this? 👀

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