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It has been known to many, through advertisements, that eating breakfast can help make us thin. But studies about breakfast health benefits being funded by cereal companies raise the question if they are really beneficial for our health.

The fact that breakfast is good for the health is true. The challenge is on how to determine if the hype from these dietary advices really promotes health benefits rather than for marketing purposes.

In the 1990's Special K cereal boxes claimed that people who did not eat breakfast normally lost more weight after they started eating breakfast in a regular basis according to The News Independent.

David Schlundt's study that consist of 50 women states that cereal makers did not mention it on the boxes that regular breakfast eaters that skip meal lost significantly even more weight as compared to those who had breakfast routines. The study shows how tricky nutrition science is and how the cereal companies can easily opt out nutrition findings that may seem irrelevant for marketing.

NY Times reported that in 2013, after reviewing dozens of studies researchers concluded that "popular opinion outweighed the scientific evidence." Some scientists tend to mischaracterize findings that are based on what people said they ate even though there is no evidence that breakfast influenced weight.

"It goes back to the idea that correlation doesn't equal causation," said Andrew Brown, a nutrition scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

One study that was published last month received criticism from health advocates after they "said that the science behind recommendations to limit sugar was weak." Researchers claimed it was paid for by Coke, Hershey and other companies in the industry.

The numbers of studies that were funded by these breakfast companies for the past decades are uncertain. Some boxes do not even disclose information about their funding source.

Those who ate cereal weighed less than those who ate different types of breakfast. The U.S. government included in its 2010 guidelines that breakfast was one way to manage weight. But an update in 2015 no longer recommended it for weight loss.