Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but only if we skip it.

Fasting is a wonderfully healthy state. When we fast, our insulin levels fall, as do our blood sugar, triglyceride and cholesterol levels. Most usefully, when we fast we lose weight. But what do too many of us do on waking?

We break that lovely gift of fasting - we literally breakfast - and we eat, so courting type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, strokes, hypertension, dementia and cancers of the liver, breast, pancreas and uterus. We are told today that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that we should eat it like a king.

In the wake of his own type 2 diabetes diagnosis, Professor Terence Kealey was given the same advice. But Professor Kealey noticed that his glucose levels were unusually high after eating first thing in the morning, whereas if he continued to fast until lunchtime they fell to a normal rate. He began to wonder how much evidence there was to support the advice he'd been given - and whether there might be an advantage to not eating breakfast after all.

Breakfast Is a Dangerous Meal asks:

• Where is the current scientific and medical evidence to support the importance of eating breakfast?
• Should we be investigating the possibility that breakfast may be doing us more harm than good?
• And what about nondiabetics: should they also skip breakfast?

Breakfast Is a Dangerous Meal will provide authoritative, welcome advice for anyone who is diabetic or prediabetic and indeed anyone who has considered skipping 'the most important meal of the day'.