Sticking with the topic of starting your day right (my previous two blogs explained the benefits of being an early bird and how you can become one), I’m going to explain why you should never skip breakfast. While I’m sure all of us have heard time and time again how supposedly beneficial eating breakfast every morning is, I can bet that probably over half of you still skip it. It’s sometimes hard, especially with early classes, to get a meal in, but so many companies have made eating breakfast such an easy thing with on-the-go products. Making it to the dining commons might not be an option but keeping things like fruit, oatmeal or wholegrain bread in your room aren’t so difficult. Here’s exactly why breakfast is the most important meal of the day:
-It provides you with necessary nutrients, vitamins and minerals to start your day off right and keep you satisfied until lunch rolls around. Without breakfast you’re skipping out on these necessities that are so easy to work into your diet through this single meal.
-Your body fasts all through the night and eating breakfast is the perfect jumpstart to your metabolism.
-Breakfast gives you the strength and endurance to get through any physical activity in the morning and prevents you from succumbing to unhealthy snacks before lunch.
-People who eat breakfast have been proven to be leaner. A study done in 2003 and published in The American Journal of Epidemiology tracked 499 peoples’ diets over the course of a year. It showed that people who skip breakfast are 4.5 times more likely to be obese than those who don’t. They are also more likely to have good cholesterol and healthy blood sugar levels.
-Finally, breakfast helps you learn and remember things better. Breakfast helps provide the brain’s fuel – glucose. Researches used 4,000 elementary school students to research the effects of eating breakfast. They first tested short-term memory by reading aloud a series of numbers and having students recite them back. Next, they gave the kids a minute to name all the animals they could think of. In both tests, those who ate breakfast scored significantly better than the students who did not.
I think these results all show how crucial it is to eat breakfast, and I myself have been trying to do a better job of working it into my morning routine. For now it’s usually just a banana on the go or maybe some oatmeal if I have time to make it. The correlation between eating breakfast and obesity seems pretty legitimate but there are so many third variables that could factor into that. Also, since the study for memory was done on elementary school kids’ whose brains are still developing, does it have the same application to adults and older college students? My next question is what exactly is most beneficial to be eating in the morning? What do you all chose to eat? That is, who of us even chooses to make eating breakfast mandatory in the morning? Who is even awake for their first meal of the day to be considered breakfast…
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5738848
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/health-benefits-breakfast_n_1968248.html#slide=1643897
http://www.jhsph.edu/offices-and-services/student-affairs/_documents/Breakfast
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/many-benefits-breakfast
