Is breakfast the most important meal of the day?

Observer

09-05-2025

Is breakfast the most important meal of the day or is it what cereal companies want us to believe? How healthy are products with sugar and fat-free labels? Why are sport companies promoting unhealthy products such as fizzy and energy drinks and how damaging are the images of famous sport figures guzzling them on young people? All these questions and more are answered by Spanish author Carlos Ríos in his book Eat Real Food published in 2019 (Spanish title: Come Comida Real).
Ríos is a dietician from Huelva who created a movement called 'Realfooding' that encourages younger generation of Spaniards — who grew up on ultra-processed food and fast-food chains — to get into healthy eating habits.
According to him, most premature deaths worldwide are related to the consumption of unhealthy food that leads to obesity, diabetes, hypertension and certain types of cancer. In his introduction, he compares living in modern societies — especially when it comes to food consumption — to living in the Matrix movie where it's hard to distinguish real world from an imaginary one. Everything on supermarket shelves is processed one way or another but Ríos categorises them into three different types: minimally-processed (eg: raw food and milk), well-processed (tinned fish and whole meal breads) and ultra-processed (junk food, breakfast cereals and diet products).
Minimally-processed is what you could eat on daily bases while the well-processed should be consumed occasionally. As for ultra-processed food, it's what you must avoid at all costs as it's full of salt, sugar, additives and refined oils such as corn, palm and sunflower seed. These types of oils cause the disequilibrium of Omega 3 and 6 in the body which causes inflammation of the cells.
The book is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to ultra-processed food and the second to Realfooding. In the first part, Ríos classify food products into 'ultra-available' and 'ultra-palatable' that are unleashed to the public by food industries with credible tools — such as marketing and publicity — that mainly target children and young adults.
Unfortunately, parents fall into the trap of ultra-processed food being healthy when labels indicate that it's full of iron or vitamin C but fail to warn them about high sugar content and harmful additives like food dyes. Ríos also discusses social effects of ultra-processed food as when young people who opt to be healthy suffer isolation from their social circles due to their diet choice and at times are forced to consume junk, as part of being the social norm or for wanting to be accepted. In the second part dedicated to Realfooding, food is divided into protective, nutritive and complimentary — with each division's own affordable and healthy recipes. Realfooding's social media pages are filled with the same type of recipes from thousands of Ríos followers along with recommendations of places and restaurants that provide fresh, healthy and homecooked meals worldwide.
After the huge success of Eat Real Food, Ríos published other books under the theme of Realfooding that includes: Cooking Real Food and Losing Weight with Real Food. However, he came under fire in 2022 after collaborating with an ultra-processed food company and promoting their healthy version of junk products that include whole meal croissants.
The article published on the English El País newspaper titled: 'Carlos Ríos: The rise and fall of the nutritionist who invented 'realfooding'' discusses reasons why the movement couldn't resist the lure of the ultra-processed food industry. When asked about ultra-processed food, Ríos answered: 'What's wrong with their existence?' Yet, the fact remains that Eat Real Food is a well-researched and an informative book, even when the author had a change of heart!