Rethinking Breakfast and Depression, One Skipped Meal at a Time
Sunday, July 6, 2025.
If you’re depressed and skipping breakfast, science has something tepid and interesting to say: they might be related.
But not in the way your grandmother insisted when she told you, “No toast, no future.”
A new study out of Hong Kong (Wong et al., 2024) suggests there’s a statistically significant—though clinically modest—link between skipping breakfast and depressive symptoms in young people.
The mechanism? Impaired attentional control, which might be the scientific equivalent of staring into space while someone tells you your GPA is tanking.
But before we panic and declare war on empty stomachs, let’s consider what this research really tells us—and what it doesn’t.
We will explore this from two angles: with compassion for the human condition and suspicion for our overeager interpretations of weak correlations.
The Breakfast Club: Hong Kong Edition
In the Hong Kong Youth Epidemiological Study of Mental Health (HK-YES), researchers looked at over 3,000 young people, most around the age of 20, and asked: who eats breakfast, who doesn’t, and what’s rattling around in their heads?
85% ate breakfast at least sometimes.
15% skipped it regularly.
Breakfast skippers were slightly more impulsive and a bit more depressed.
They also had a tiny bit more anxiety and lost about one day of productivity a month compared to their toast-munching peers.
Statistically valid? Yes. Psychologically thrilling? Debatable.
The depressive symptoms were measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), and impulsivity was gauged using the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale–11 (Wong et al., 2024). There’s no beef with the tools—they’re well-validated—but the strength of the associations was described by the researchers themselves as “very weak.”
Let’s repeat that for the folks in the back: the correlation between skipping breakfast and depression was real, but weak.
What’s for Breakfast in the Global Psyche?
Here’s where it gets spicy: Western research on breakfast and mental health shows a similar pattern. There’s a consistent—if not always compelling—link between skipping breakfast and higher rates of depressive symptoms (Adolphus et al., 2013; O’Sullivan et al., 2009). However, whether skipping breakfast causes depression, or if depressed people just aren’t in the mood to make eggs, remains unsolved.
In fact, Adolphus and colleagues (2013) conducted a systematic review that suggested eating breakfast may improve cognitive performance in children and adolescents—but again, most of the studies were observational, not causal.
Meanwhile, a study by Smith (2010) found that habitual breakfast consumption was linked to better mood and lower levels of perceived stress among adults. Still, it’s hard to tell whether breakfast is the hero or just a sidekick to better sleep, routine, or parental supervision.
Even meta-analyses—our beloved aggregators of small truths—suggest only a modest protective effect of breakfast on psychological well-being (Liu et al., 2018). Translation: you might feel better if you eat breakfast, but skipping it won’t launch you into an existential crisis unless you were already teetering on the edge.
But Wait—Is It Really About the Food?
Here’s where Asimov would smile: maybe breakfast isn’t about nutrients, but about order.
Breakfast, especially in cultures with communal meals, can act as a regulatory ritual. It’s one of the first daily signals to the body and brain that “we’re doing things today.”
In the language of neurobiology, this is called zeitgeber signaling—time cues that help regulate our circadian rhythms (Roenneberg et al., 2003). And guess what? Disrupted circadian rhythms are well-linked to depression (McClung, 2007).
So maybe it’s not the absence of food, but the absence of ritualized stability that marks the breakfast-depression connection. In that sense, skipping breakfast is one tile in a much larger mosaic of dysregulated routines, sleep, impulsivity, and low mood.
A Little Bit of Chicken Soup, Minus the Chicken
The authors of the Hong Kong study recommend lifestyle interventions that promote regular breakfast routines as a potential nudge toward better mental health (Wong et al., 2024). Not a cure. Not a miracle. A nudge. Think: oatmeal with a side of agency.
That recommendation aligns with broader mental health research advocating for small behavioral shifts—sleep regularity, meal timing, exercise—as supportive, not curative, interventions for mood disorders (Jacka et al., 2017).
But let’s be careful not to moralize. Skipping breakfast doesn’t make you lazy, broken, or doomed. Sometimes, depression skips breakfast for you.
So What Should Clinicians Say?
If you’re a therapist working with a gloomy 20-year-old who hasn’t eaten since Tuesday unless cold brew counts, you might say this:
“Would you be willing to try eating something in the morning—just as an experiment—not to fix your depression, but to give your brain some rhythm again?”
Frame it as an experiment, not a commandment. In other words, If we are what we eat, we must be careful when we decide to skip.
Final Bite: Don’t Panic Over Pancakes
In summary:
The study was solid, the findings were statistically weak, but suggestive.
Breakfast may be a behavioral proxy for other things: regulation, care, and routine.
The link between food and mood isn’t just biochemical—it’s cultural, emotional, and, yes, existential.
If you’re skipping breakfast, try not to skip self-compassion too.
Because sometimes, what your brain really needs isn’t eggs—it’s rhythm.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Adolphus, K., Lawton, C. L., & Dye, L. (2013). The effects of breakfast on behavior and academic performance in children and adolescents. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 425. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00425
Jacka, F. N., O'Neil, A., Opie, R., Itsiopoulos, C., Cotton, S., Mohebbi, M., ... & Berk, M. (2017). A randomized controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the “SMILES” trial). BMC Medicine, 15(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-017-0791-y
Liu, Y., Song, Y., Koopman, J. L., & Li, Z. (2018). Breakfast and mental health: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Appetite, 127, 274–281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2018.04.007
McClung, C. A. (2007). Circadian genes, rhythms and the biology of mood disorders. Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 114(2), 222–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pharmthera.2007.02.003
Roenneberg, T., Daan, S., & Merrow, M. (2003). The art of entrainment. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 18(3), 183–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730403018003001
Smith, A. P. (2010). Breakfast and mental health. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, 61(S1), 36–42. https://doi.org/10.3109/09637486.2010.511604
Wong, S. M. Y., Choi, O., Suen, Y. N., Hui, C. L. M., Lee, E. H. M., Chan, S. K. W., & Chen, E. Y. H. (2024). Breakfast skipping and depressive symptoms in an epidemiological youth sample in Hong Kong: The mediating role of reduced attentional control. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1275621. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1275621