Did you know that on Amazon.com you can get a large colander with “comfortable handles” shaped like a vegetable basket that “doubles as a container for bath toys as well as beach gear” in pink, green, almond, or eggshell blue for only $33?

I do - though I’d rather not.

I wanted a colander, not an education on them. But I wound up getting both along with a good bit of eye strain after looking at and reading about dozens upon dozens of them and all the possible permutations.

Like the collapsable, space-saving one made of silicone I finally settled upon after having a more expensive stainless steel one already in my shopping cart. Fitness Master forever; self-indulgent spendthrift never.

This cyberspace shopping experience got me to thinking (maybe because the eye strain kept me from anything else) about information overload on the internet and how it affects -what else? - health and fitness.

A buddy of mine has a teenaged son bright enough and outspoken enough to make him work, in his words, “parental overtime.” One morning, he told his son to eat breakfast for a change because - as he was told by his parents - it’s the most important meal of the day.

The boy conveyed his contempt at the notion with an eye roll to end all eye rolls and said, “Haven’t you ever heard of intermittent fasting?”

He had. He also had an idea how to silence his son.

He’d search for a study or two in support of eating breakfast, memorize the best statistics, and start the same argument again. Only this time, he’d be the one rolling his eyes as if he were the most exasperated 13-year-old in the Lehigh Valley.

But the second round of eye rolling never happened. For every study he found in support of eating breakfast, he uncovered another claiming whether you did or didn’t didn’t really matter.

Plus a few that actually linked eating breakfast to gaining weight.

At that point, he told me of his descent into a “never-ending rabbit hole” and asked me if the conflicting research meant to eat or not to eat breakfast was really “much ado about nothing”?

I told him that’s not what conflicting research suggests to me. That it can result from a whole host of variables, and variables need to be reduced in any pursuit of optimal health and fitness.

That the way to reduce them is to be consistent in your approach, whether it be exercising or eating - or even dealing with an eye-rolling teen.

I’m a big believer in the benefits of consistency and have been ever since I got really serious about health and fitness in college. A good friend of mine back then who was an absolute organizational mess, in fact, once joked I should change my name from Kevin to Consistency. (I told him it sounded too much like a girl’s name.)

I told my advice-seeking buddy not to battle with his son as much as encourage him to eat breakfast regularly for a while as a way to assess whether skipping it served him best. Since the boy sees himself as an athlete, to stress that what’s best for a young athlete may not jibe with what works for an older intermittent faster.

If that advice strikes you as a cop out, feel free to hop down the rabbit hole yourself. A tiny bit of what’s down there follows.

A study published in the July 2003 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology seems to support a dietary strategy that’s now passé, grazing, as well as the importance of breakfast for weight management. In an eating-habits analysis of the of 499 participants over a one-year period, researchers found those who grazed as compared to those who didn’t were 55 percent less likely to be obese.

And that those who skipped breakfast 450 percent more likely to become so.

A December 2010 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition followed nearly 2200 Aussies from childhood to adulthood and determined the participants who skipped breakfast during both of those times now had bigger waists, higher fasting insulin levels, higher total cholesterol and higher LDL-cholesterol levels than those who ate breakfast at some point. These differences “remained significant” even when overall diet quality entered the equation.

Conversely, a July 2012 study published in Physiology and Behavior found “no caloric compensation” later in the day when subjects deemed to be normal eaters skipped breakfast. Moreover, when compared to the participants fed breakfast by the researchers and then observed for the remainder of the day, those who skipped breakfast consumed 408 fewer calories on average.

A meta-analysis that encompassed 13 prior trials and was published in the January 2019 issue of BMJ also found breakfast eaters consume more calories throughout the day than breakfast skippers. In conclusion, the authors note “the addition of breakfast might not be a good strategy for weight loss,” and including breakfast in a weight-loss strategy “could have the opposite effect.”