Breakfast

Breakfast: Is It Still the Most Important Meal of the Day?

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We’ve all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But is it? A pair of recent studies has some questioning this long-held advice.

breakfast foods

Breakfast has been associated with lower body weight in observational studies, a type of study in which researchers simply observe individuals or measure outcomes. However, researchers have yet to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between eating breakfast and shedding pounds.

The two studies that came out in recent months seemed to say eating breakfast did not play a role in weight loss. They surprised many because for so long we all thought that we had to eat breakfast to be healthy and to lose weight.

Despite the two recent studies, I will still tell my patients to eat breakfast daily.

The findings

Let’s look at the studies. In one, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham examined eating habits among nearly 300 participants who researchers split randomly into three groups. One group ate breakfast, one group did not eat breakfast, and members of the third group maintained their current eating habits.

Then the researchers weighed participants after a 16-week period. The researchers found no significant difference in weight loss among the groups.

In the second study, conducted at the University of Bath, researchers randomly assigned 33 lean subjects to either eat or skip breakfast. Six weeks later, the participants’ cholesterol levels, resting metabolic rates and overall blood-sugar levels were unchanged. Nor did they overeat during the day.

The researchers did find, however, that people who skipped breakfast were more likely to be lethargic and less active in the morning. The breakfast-skippers also ate less over the course of the day than did breakfast-eaters, though they also burned fewer calories.

More research needed

So what to make of this research? My reading is that these studies taken together show that you will not gain weight if you skip breakfast. Recall that the conventional wisdom is that if you want to lose weight, you should eat breakfast – it does not concern skipping breakfast. For those who are trying to lose weight, breakfast plays an important role in controlling hunger and maintaining energy throughout the day.

My other observation is that the second study shows that while biomarkers such as cholesterol levels may be unchanged, the breakfast-skippers also burned fewer calories. People trying to lose weight need to rev up their metabolism. So burning fewer calories because you’re skipping breakfast could be a drawback.

The takeaway for me is that if you are happy with your weight, you can choose whether to eat breakfast or skip it. For those who want to lose weight, I recommend a high-protein breakfast such as an egg-white omelet, or non-fat Greek yogurt. This kind of a meal can provide energy to power through your morning and help ward off cravings and binge-eating later in the day.

5 Reasons to Skip Breakfast

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Once considered the foundation of any healthy diet, the morning meal may now be negotiable.

The belief that we won’t have our get-up-and-go unless we down our Cheerios has turned the concept of eating upon rising into a die-hard dietary rule. Original research on whether breakfast made an impact on health did find that healthier people ate breakfast. But data, as we know, doesn’t always tell the whole story.

“Lots of people who skip breakfast or practice intermittentfasting are healthy too,” says Dr. John Berardi, co-founder ofPrecision Nutrition. “About 85% of the clients we work with eat breakfast and tend to follow a guideline of eating small frequent meals throughout the day, but that’s largely to help them learn to practice healthier eating habits. If you’re a person who regularly makes good nutritional choices, then eating breakfast is more negotiable.”

In fact, skipping that first meal may lead to some real benefits — from possibly losing a few pounds to increasing your level of anti-aging growth hormone. And don’t worry, your metabolism won’t suffer. Eating small meals throughout the day, starting with breakfast, isn’t necessary to stimulate metabolism, says Berardi, who co-authored an extensive study review on meal frequency for the International Society of Sports Nutrition.

His suggested revise to the dictate: Breakfast is optional. Hard-and-fast rules don’t allow for much mindfulness, anyway — and that’s an integral part of any nutritional approach. So if you love how breakfast gets you going, feel free to stick with that routine, but if you’re not a morning person, there’s no harm in forgoing food first thing.

Here, Berardi suggests 5 reasons to skip breakfast:

1. It’s not required to boost metabolism. The idea that metabolism slows radically in response to not eating certain meals in a single day just isn’t accurate. The amount of calories you’re taking in and the composition of those calories — proteins, carbs, and fats — are really what impact metabolism.

2. It may lead to eating less overall. If you skip breakfast, you can eat fewer, larger meals beginning later in the day, rather than 6 smaller meals throughout the day, which may be less satisfying. This can lower your total caloric intake for the day and may lead to weight loss.

3. There’s a payoff even if you’re an occasional skipper. Intermittent fasting reduces insulin levels, so you can actually increase your insulin sensitivity for better blood sugar management. At the same time, your body will release more growth hormone, which helps to preserve lean tissue and burn fat tissue.

4. It can help lower your total carb intake for the day. Most of us are over-carbed. We eat too many refined carbs, too little protein, and too much fat. So by skipping breakfast it can steer you away from the typical high-carb breakfast foods — toast, oatmeal, cereal, pancakes — that may trigger an insulin response that kicks you out of fat-burning mode.

5. It can help you tune in to your body. You just might feel better sipping water with lemon or a green juice rather than forcing food in the morning. Some people feel nauseous and not ready to eat right when they get up and in that case you’re better off listening to your body’s cues. Ideally, you want to figure out what works best for you.

Breakfast isn’t as important as you’ve been told .

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Is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Not according to the latest research.

breakfast-good

The importance of breakfast might be one of the longest running myths when it comes to dietary health, because when you actually look into the science behind it, there’s not much evidence to support its lofty status as “the most important meal of the day”. In fact, a spate of new research independently conducted by different universities around the world and published this month in theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that breakfast has little to no effect on a person’s weight and overall health.

In one of the studies, researchers at the University of Alabama and other institutions in the US gathered almost 300 volunteers who had started dieting before the study. These volunteers were split into three groups and told to either eat breakfast every day, skip breakfast every day, or keep on doing what they were doing. The people who were told to continue what they were doing were already in the habit of consistently eating or skipping breakfast.

Four months later, the volunteers were weighed, and the only gain or loss any of them had experienced since they started the study was half a kilo or so. According to Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times, “weight in all groups [was] unaffected by whether someone ate breakfast or skipped it”.

A separate study conducted by researchers at the University of Bath in the UK took on 33 slim volunteers and started out by measuring their metabolic rates, cholesterol levels and blood-sugar profiles. They were then split into two groups, and half were told to eat breakfast, and half to skip it. They were given activity monitors to record how active they were in the morning.

Six weeks later, both groups had their body weights, metabolic rates, cholesterol and blood sugar levels measured again and the researchers found that they were about the same as they were at the beginning of the study.

“The one difference was that the breakfast eaters seemed to move around more during the morning; their activity monitors showed that volunteers in this group burned almost 500 calories more in light-intensity movement,” says Reynolds at the New York Times. “But by eating breakfast, they also consumed an additional 500 calories each day. Contrary to popular belief, skipping breakfast had not driven volunteers to wolf down enormous lunches and dinners – but it had made them somewhat more sluggish first thing in the morning.”

“Breakfast may be just another meal,” said one of the team at the University of Alabama, Emily Dhurandhar, because so far there’s been little evidence to suggest that skipping it can lead to any signicant effect on a person’s weight or general health.

Both studies were relatively short-term, and future studies could stand to include more volunteers, but “the slightly unsatisfying takeaway from the new science,” says Reynolds, “would seem to be that if you like breakfast, fine; but if not, don’t sweat it.”

Why You Should Eat Breakfast and the Best Times for the Rest of the Day’s Meals.

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Keeping track of what you’re supposed to eat to stay healthy can already be overwhelming, but it turns out that when you eat what can also be important for keeping your weight in control and for warding off chronic disease.

It turns out Mom was right: you should eat breakfast. And if you don’t believe Mom, a growing body of studies shows that a good meal in the morning can help your body prepare for the day to come, and lower your risk of heart disease, diabetesand obesity. But what about the rest of the day’s meals? Here’s what nutrition experts say about the best times to eat and why.

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Morning
Don’t skip breakfast. Reporting in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, Harvard School of Public Health researchers studied the health outcomes of 26,902 male health professionals ages 45 to 82 over a 16-year period. They discovered that the men who skipped breakfast had a 27% higher risk of heart attack or death from heart disease than those who honored the morning meal. According to the scientists, skipping breakfast may make you hungrier and more likely to eat larger meals, which leads to a surge in blood sugar. Such spikes can pave the way for diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, all risk factors that can snowball into a heart attack.

Pass on the pastry. Eating in the morning — and what you eat — is important for setting your blood-sugar pattern for the rest of the day. “If you eat something that is whole grain and has some fat and protein to it, your blood sugar is going to rise slowly and go down slowly. If you eat something refined, like an overly sweet cinnamon roll, that’s the worst thing you can eat,” says Judy Caplan, a registered dietitian nutritionist for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “You get an insulin [spike], and [then] your blood sugar drops too low so you get hungry again. That’s why people get into a cycle of overeating junk.”

To ease your body into a more consistent blood-sugar pattern, try some oatmeal, whole-wheat toast with almond butter, or an omelette with spinach and avocado. Caplan’s favorite breakfast is a baked sweet potato with a little bit of cinnamon and a small bit of butter. Who says you have to eat just cereal in the morning?

Afternoon
Fuel up at the right time. In the 1960s, nutritionist Adelle Davis popularized the mantra “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.” Why? Fueling up makes sense earlier in the day, when your body needs the most calories for energy. That’s why in many European countries, the largest meal of the day occurs in the afternoon. “Ideally, you want to give yourself fuel before you do harder labor,” says Caplan.

If you’re used to eating a smaller meal for lunch and a larger meal later, you can still fill up with a hearty meal that has significantly fewer calories. “A fairly large meal [that] is full of salad and vegetables [is] big in volume but light in calories,” says Caplan.

Evening
Don’t overdo it. Calories get burned up no matter when you eat them, so theoretically it’s O.K. to eat after dark. But if you eat a heavy dinner, you’re not as likely to get rid of those calories before you turn in. “What you don’t burn off is more likely to be stored as fat, as you become less active toward the end of the day,” says Tracy Lockwood, a registered dietitian at F-Factor Nutrition. “Eating too close to bedtime increases your blood sugar and insulin, which causes you to have a hard time falling asleep. Therefore, your last meal should be the lightest of the day and should be eaten at least three hours before you go to sleep.”

There’s another reason that late-night eating, after dinner, isn’t a good idea. In most cases, those visits to the fridge involve sweet treats such as ice cream and other desserts that can send blood sugar soaring right before bed. That can lower levels of the hormone melatonin, which is supposed to help you feel tired and relaxed, so waning levels can make it harder to fall asleep. “A boost of energy coming from your dinner, which may have consisted of pasta, rice or bread, can act as a short-lived stimulant, causing you to feel more awake immediately after a meal,” says Lockwood. “Also, it is not recommended to lie down immediately after a meal, especially a big one, since it increases your chance for acid reflux.”

Keep it light. “If you go to Europe and places where there is not as much obesity as the rest of the world, people eat very late and they’re not necessarily overweight. That’s because they are walking everywhere and they are typically not eating a huge and heavy meal,” says Caplan. “Instead, it may be avocado and toast with a side of soup.”

Source: http://healthland.time.com

 

 

 

Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?

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British people – and many others across the world – have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn’t always that way.

People are repeatedly told the hallowed family dinner around a table is in decline and the UK is not the only country experiencing such change.

The case for breakfast, missed by many with deleterious effects, is that it makes us more alert, helps keep us trim and improves children’s work and behaviour at school.

But when people worry that breaking with the traditional three meals a day is harmful, are they right about the traditional part? Have people always eaten in that pattern?

Breakfast as we know it didn’t exist for large parts of history. TheRomans didn’t really eat it, usually consuming only one meal a day around noon, says food historian Caroline Yeldham. In fact, breakfast was actively frowned upon.

“The Romans believed it was healthier to eat only one meal a day,” she says. “They were obsessed with digestion and eating more than one meal was considered a form of gluttony. This thinking impacted on the way people ate for a very long time.”

In the Middle Ages monastic life largely shaped when people ate, says food historian Ivan Day. Nothing could be eaten before morning Mass and meat could only be eaten for half the days of the year. It’s thought the word breakfast entered the English language during this time and literally meant “break the night’s fast”.

Religious ritual also gave us the full English breakfast. On Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, people had to use up meat before the start of Lent. Much of that meat was pork and bacon as pigs were kept by many people. The meat was often eaten with eggs, which also had to be used up, and the precursor of the full English breakfast was born.

But at the time it probably wasn’t eaten in the morning.

In about the 17th Century it is believed that all social classes started eating breakfast, according to chef Clarissa Dickson Wright. After the restoration of Charles II, coffee, tea and dishes like scrambled eggs started to appear on the tables of the wealthy. By the late 1740s, breakfast rooms also started appearing in the homes of the rich.

This morning meal reached new levels of decadence in aristocratic circles in the 19th Century, with the fashion for hunting parties that lasted days, even weeks. Up to 24 dishes would be served for breakfast.

The Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th Century regularised working hours, with labourers needing an early meal to sustain them at work. All classes started to eat a meal before going to work, even the bosses.

At the turn of the 20th Century, breakfast was revolutionised once again by American John Harvey Kellogg. He accidentally left some boiled maize out and it went stale. He passed it through some rollers and baked it, creating the world’s first cornflake. He sparked a multi-billion pound industry.

By the 1920s and 1930s the government was promoting breakfast as the most important meal of the day, but then World War II made the usual breakfast fare hard to get. But as Britain emerged from the post-war years into the economically liberated 1950s, things like American toasters, sliced bread, instant coffee and pre-sugared cereals invaded the home. Breakfast as we now know it.

 

The terminology around eating in the UK is still confusing. For some “lunch” is “dinner” and vice versa. From the Roman times to the Middle Ages everyone ate in the middle of the day, but it was called dinner and was the main meal of the day. Lunch as we know it didn’t exist – not even the word.

During the Middle Ages daylight shaped mealtimes, says Day. With no electricity, people got up earlier to make use of daylight. Workers had often toiled in the fields from daybreak, so by midday they were hungry.

“The whole day was structured differently than it is today,” says Day. “People got up much earlier and went to bed much earlier.”

By midday workers had often worked for up to six hours. They would take a quick break and eat what was known as a “beever” or “noonshine”, usually bread and cheese. As artificial light developed, dinner started to shift later in the day for the wealthier, as a result a light meal during the day was needed.

The origins of the word “lunch” are mysterious and complicated, says Day. “Lunch was a very rare word up until the 19th Century,” he says.

One theory is that it’s derived from the word “nuncheon”, an old Anglo-Saxon word which meant a quick snack between meals that you can hold in your hands. It was used around the late 17th Century, says Yeldham. Others theorise that it comes from the word “nuch” which was used around in the 16th and 17th Century and means a big piece of bread.

But it’s the French custom of “souper” in the 17th Century that helped shaped what most of us eat for lunch today. It became fashionable among the British aristocracy to copy the French and eat a light meal in the evening. It was a more private meal while they gamed and womanised, says Day.

It’s the Earl of Sandwich’s famous late-night snack from the 1750s that has come to dominate the modern lunchtime menu. One evening he ordered his valet to bring him cold meats between some bread. He could eat the snack with just one hand and wouldn’t get grease on anything.

Whether he was wrapped up in an all-night card game or working at his desk is not clear, both have been suggested. But whatever he was doing, the sandwich was born.

At the time lunch, however, was still known “as an accidental happening between meals”, says food historian Monica Askay.

Again, it was the Industrial Revolution that helped shape lunch as we know it today. Middle and lower class eating patterns were defined by working hours. Many were working long hours in factories and to sustain them a noon-time meal was essential.

Pies were sold on stalls outside factories. People also started to rely on mass-produced food as there was no room in towns and cities for gardens to keep a pig pen or grow their own food. Many didn’t even have a kitchen.

“Britain was the first country in the world to feed people with industrialised food,” says Day.

The ritual of taking lunch became ingrained in the daily routine. In the 19th Century chop houses opened in cities and office workers were given one hour for lunch. But as war broke out in 1939 and rationing took hold, the lunch was forced to evolve. Work-based canteens became the most economical way to feed the masses. It was this model that was adopted by schools after the war.

The 1950s brought a post-War world of cafes and luncheon vouchers. The Chorleywood Process, a new way of producing bread, also meant the basic loaf could be produced more cheaply and quickly than ever. The takeaway sandwich quickly began to fill the niche as a fast, cheap lunch choice.

Today the average time taken to eat lunch – usually in front of the computer – is roughly 15 minutes, according to researchers at the University of Westminster. The original meaning of lunch or “nuncheon” as a small, quick snack between proper meals is just as apt now as it ever was.

 

Dinner was the one meal the Romans did eat, even if it was at a different time of day.

In the UK the heyday of dinner was in the Middle Ages. It was known as “cena”, Latin for dinner. The aristocracy ate formal, outrageously lavish dinners around noon. Despite their reputation for being unruly affairs, they were actually very sophisticated, with strict table manners.

They were an ostentatious display of wealth and power, with cooks working in the kitchen from dawn to get things ready, says Yeldham. With no electricity cooking dinner in the evening was not an option. Peasants ate dinner around midday too, although it was a much more modest affair.

As artificial lighting spread, dinner started to be eaten later and later in the day. It was in the 17th Century that the working lunch started, where men with aspirations would network.

The middle and lower classes eating patterns were also defined by their working hours. By the late 18th Century most people were eating three meals a day in towns and cities, says Day.

By the early 19th Century dinner for most people had been pushed into the evenings, after work when they returned home for a full meal. Many people, however, retained the traditional “dinner hour” on a Sunday.

The hallowed family dinner we are so familiar with became accessible to all in the glorious consumer spending spree of the 1950s. New white goods arrived from America and the dream of the wife at home baking became a reality. Then the TV arrived.

TV cook Fanny Cradock brought the 1970s Cordon Bleu dinner to life. Many middle-class women were bored at home and found self-expression by competing with each other over who could hold the best dinner party.

The death knell for the family dinner supposedly sounded in 1986, when the first microwave meal came on to the market. But while a formal family dinner may be eaten by fewer people nowadays, the dinner party certainly isn’t over – fuelled by the phenomenal sales of recipe books by celebrity chefs.

Source:BBC