According to a blog, the mantra of breakfast being the most important meal of the day has been ingrained in most people from an early age, who are told that breakfast helps metabolism and skipping it will increase hunger, which leads to overeating and weight gain. It adds that these are not just old wives’ tales but are clearly laid out in current Public Health England and NHS guidelines prepared by an expert scientific panel with input from the food industry. It notes there is reasonable evidence to suggest that skipping breakfast can actually be useful and accumulating evidence that restricting eating times and increasing fasting intervals can help certain people to lose weight. Furthermore, some of these recent developments that seem counterintuitive to traditional thinking make sense in the context of the importance of the gut microbiome on human health and metabolism. The blogger questions why the specialty has got it so wrong in the past.