Do you believe that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day?” If so, then you may be a victim of marketing and the illusory truth effect.
It is “common knowledge” that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You’ve likely heard it hundreds of times from dozens of credible people. Your parents, teachers, and your football coach will all tell you that if you skip breakfast, then you will not perform at your peak. But, is this true?
If there is one thing that marketers know and understand it’s human psychology and they are very good at exploiting it. Enter the Illusory Truth Effect.
We’ve all heard that “a lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Among others, the line has been mis-attributed to men like Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Goebbels. Although I can only speculate, I believe that the reason these men are attributed with the line is because of its inherent insidiousness.
The benign truth is that the line can be first attributed to Isa Blagden in The Crown of a Life, which was published in 1869. Of course, that’s not to say that it hasn’t been repeated by Nazis and Communists over the years and used as a strategy to meet their ends, but it is certainly not the origin of the line or of the idea itself.
“If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.“
Isa Blagden, The Crown of a Life V2 (1869)
It is ironic, then, that the attribution of the line is a result of the wisdom of the line itself! This only demonstrates how powerful the idea of repeated information gaining validity is.
In their 1977 paper Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, authors Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino show that there is “…empirical support to the idea that ‘if people are told something often enough, they’ll believe it.'”
“The present research has demonstrated that the repetition of a plausible statement increases a person’s belief in the referential validity or truth of that statement.”
Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino, Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity (1977)
Let’s think about the line that claims “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” It has become an axiom for fad diets and YouTube fitness “experts.” It is so often repeated that people take its wisdom for granted without knowing its origins or how the line became so popular.
If someone were to make the claim that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I would expect that there was a scientific study completed to assess the benefits of breakfast. Perhaps there were sensors to to examine physiological output or blood labs completed and surveys to assess how the control or experimental groups had felt throughout the day. I would assume that their productivity was measured in some way and variables like time asleep at night or type of work (e.g., physical labor or office work) were controlled for.
I would assume all of those things, but I would be wrong.
In 1917, Lenna F. Cooper, co-founder of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, wrote an article in Good Health magazine titled “August Breakfasts,” in which she makes the claim that breakfast may be the most important meal of the day. This follows her brief discussion about breakfast being overlooked and under prioritized as a social family affair.
“Yet in many ways the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started.”
Lenna F Cooper. “August Breakfast.” Good Health, Vol 52, 1917, p 389.
The editor of that magazine was John Harvey Kellogg, MD (yes, that Kellogg!), who had a personal incentive to promote the consumption of breakfast in order to boost his sales of Corn Flakes. From the time it was published in 1917 until today, the line “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” has, in fact, been the most important marketing tool for sales of breakfast foods.
A search for academic articles returns dozens of scholarly papers both in support of and opposition to the idea that breakfast is the most important meal. I went down this rabbit hole and there is good research on both sides. Regardless, it does nothing to prove or dispel the illusory truth that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
To a breakfast marketer, however, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. All that matters is whether people accept it as truth. If you are in the breakfast business, then you want people to believe that it is the most important meal of the day and if that is repeated dogmatically, then much of the work is done for you.
UPDATE: This morning, I came across a video on Derek Muller’s Veritasium YouTube channel. Veritasium is one of my favorite YouTube channels to watch and I highly recommend it to anyone with an inquisitive mind. Derek does a great job explaining cognitive ease and how the repetition of a statement (or word, in the example used in the video) can increase its familiarity and, thus, the tendency to believe that it is true or favorable.
Enjoy the video and subscribe to Veritasium!
Update 2: This morning I came across another video that is relevant to the subject matter in this post. This one is from John Stossel who examines the claims about the benefits of breakfast. (5/7/2023)
I have made a point to keep my posts simplified and non-technical so that the widest audience (ie., students and those with zero subject background) will be able to benefit from them.
Christopher Padilla 
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