The Importance of Eating Breakfast

           Breakfast is the first meal of the day as it helps everyone start the day off on the right foot. Eating breakfast not only fills one up in the morning, but it also improves concentration and memory, and keeps people healthier. Eating breakfast also reduces the risk of having diabetes and or having a heart attack, and helps to maintain a healthy weight.

            According to an article in the scientific journal Physiology & Behavior, an experiment by Loughborough University(¹) showed that eating breakfast improves concentration. Students who ate nutritional balanced breakfasts reported better concentration and more positive reactions to difficult tasks in the morning and throughout the day. Those students (who ate breakfast) showed twice as much concentration as the students who did not eat breakfast. They also had a faster memory recall that was about 75% faster than students who did not eat breakfast, showing that eating breakfast improved more positive reactions and faster memory recall. 

            Web MD(3) and the American Journal of Epidemiology(4) suggests that eating breakfast keeps people healthier over all. Having food in one’s stomach helps every system in the body function properly. It stops the body from hoarding food and gaining excess weight. Eating breakfast allows the body to regulate its system not just in the morning but also throughout the day. 

            BBC News' Dr. Mark Pereira(2) showed that breakfast, in addition to keeping up general health, also reduces the risk of having diabetes and or having a heart attack. Eating breakfast helps to balance the body’s systems, which is what the body needs to maintain good health. Overall good health puts less stress on the body allowing it to produce all of the insulin it needs to function properly.

            Eating breakfast helps the body in so many beneficial ways that it would be hard to imagine skipping it. The positive feedback our bodies give us in return for eating a healthy breakfast turns the foods we choose into a breakfast of champions.

Citations

1. Simon B. Cooper, Stephan Bandelow, and Mary E. Nevill “Breakfast consumption and cognitive function in adolescent schoolchildren” Physiology & Behavior Volume 103, Issue 5, 6 July 2011 <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938411001375>
2. "Breakfast is the most important meal" <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2824987.stm>
3. "The many benefits of breakfast" Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD, <http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/many-benefits-breakfast>
4. <http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/158/1/85.full>