From an early age, we are told that breakfast is an essential part of a healthy diet and well-being, especially when you try to control your weight. Meanwhile, up to 30% worldwide skip breakfast. The majority explains it by the lack of time, appetite, or their habits.
Nevertheless, all these reasons look more like excuses. The importance of breakfast has been discussed by doctors and dieting specialists for a long time. Almost all of them confirm that breakfast benefits your health — almost, but not all, actually.
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An alternative viewpoint
Skipping breakfast is against recommendations. Everything is simple: if you don’t eat in the morning, you will stay hungry for the whole day, regardless of how many calories you consume. This causes cravings for food and leads to gaining extra kilos.
Read more: 10 Foods That Seem Healthy But Are Actually Bad For You
The explanation seems reasonable until you learn more. Researches decided to check whether people who skip breakfast really eat more. It turns out that the systematic study of this issue is not that simple due to several reasons.
Technically, breakfast is a meal you eat before 10 a.m. It means if you eat five minutes later, you skip breakfast, and this fact distorts a result a bit. So when exactly you are to eat to call it “breakfast” with confidence?
There is even more controversial thing: the breakfast differs in different countries and in different families as well. Some prefer sandwiches, some like omelets, some like cereals, oatmeal or yogurt. All these options differ by ingredients and caloric value.
Discovering potential benefits
The mistake of the majority of the dieting specialists is that they don’t always pay attention to a cause-effect relation. Sometimes an excess weight is a result of having breakfast, not skipping it. The investigations prove that giving up breakfast can help to lose weight occasionally, but it takes a long time.
Read more: 3+ High-Protein Breakfast Ideas You Will Love
More potential benefits
If we want to find an obvious and undeniable health benefit for skipping breakfast, it is saving time. Some will say that it doesn’t take much time. Nevertheless, saving 15-30 minutes may be vital for much more people than you expect.
If you eat in a rush, you don’t chew food well, risking to choke, slow down the metabolism, or start your day with overeating. If you are late because of having breakfast, you risk to be less attentive on your way, hurt yourself, get stomach cramps just because you didn’t have a break before running outside.
A popular myth
There is one more thing to keep in mind: the idea of a healthy breakfast is to the great extent promoted by the manufacturers of dry breakfast cereals. Regular breakfast has become a basic premise for a healthy lifestyle in the 1960s, approximately when the cereals became popular.
It is more important to pay attention to what we eat, not when we do it. If you plan to have fast carbs in the morning, skipping it is better to skip the breakfast at all. The processed carbohydrates cause the boost of blood sugar level and set your body into fat accumulation mode.
As a result, you will want to eat more and become hungry quite soon. Moreover, a semi-sleeping organism that hasn’t activated all its system properly finds it difficult to digest a meal high in calories in the morning. Again, it leads to fat accumulation.
Read more: What Is A Balanced Diet
The bottom line
You cannot answer the question of whether breakfast is useful with 100% certainty. There are numerous factors affecting this decision – when you wake up, how much time you have for a meal, what you eat, and some physical aspects as well. If you need a list of potential benefits, here they are:
- No eating in a rash without chewing your food properly.
- No stomach cramps.
- You can lose weight.
- You don’t get extra calories that are impossible to digest.
- You listen to your body – it knows better what it needs.
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