All these years I have been standing over my children at breakfast time, making sure they eat a decent meal before they leave the house.

“It sets you up for the day,” I have always been told, believing that not only was it good for your health and wellbeing, but for your brain.

If you had an exam, a healthy breakfast was a must to aid concentration, we were always told at school.

But now I’m confused. A biochemist and former Cambridge academic says studies showing children achieve better results on a good breakfast are misleading - most having been carried out by cereal manufacturers - and that forcing children to eat breakfast is a form of child abuse.

He also believes that it is a ‘dangerous’ meal as it increases blood glucose levels and puts adults at risk of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Looking at my bowl of Rice Krispies this morning, it didn’t appear particularly threatening, but I was sufficiently perturbed not to fill it to the brim as I normally do.

When I was young, if my mum had had her way we would have eaten bacon, eggs and all the trimmings before leaving for school. She ran a bed and breakfast and lavished delicious fare upon her guests - most will not have needed to eat lunch or tea.

York Press:

The full English. Is it good for you? Probably not..

Most guests were walkers following the coast-to-coast route and for them skipping breakfast would have been unthinkable.

I have never left the house on a morning without breakfast and hate it when my daughters skip the meal. I have been known to race down the street after them brandishing a banana or apple. But breakfast as a necessity is how most of us have been conditioned.

Another baffling piece of news this week claimed that snacking was the best way to lose weight.

The idea of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner is out of date, says the National Obesity Forum. Instead, people who want to stay slim are advised to eat smaller portions more often.

So snacking is in, and the concept of eating three square meals a day is out. Like most people, I have always been told not to snack, not to eat between meals, not to pick or graze. Yet now all those things are okay. I think snacking makes people feel even more hungry. I know if a cake suddenly appears in our office - as it does on birthdays and other occasions - I feel ravenous after a slice.

At least so-called experts are agreed that eating late at night is bad for us. They warn that it puts millions of people in danger of heart attacks and strokes. A late-night meal keeps the body on ‘high alert’ when it should be winding down, researchers found.

Heart experts advise adults should never eat within two hours of bedtime - and ideally nothing after 7pm.

But the lives people lead mean it is not easy to eat in the late afternoon or early evening as families did decades ago - growing up in the seventies my mum had tea on the table at around 5pm. Now many people, including me, don’t arrive home until past that, and then the meal has to be cooked.

Nowadays, what not to eat is more of an issue than what to eat. What was right suddenly becomes wrong, and what was healthy suddenly isn’t. We all may as well throw in the towel and live off take-aways. It is more than likely that one day soon someone will say how good for us they are.