Don’t forget breakfast

The long and short term consequences of skipping breakfast.

When you’re trying to get out the door in the morning, it’s easy to skip breakfast. Besides, breakfast takes too long, and you just don’t have the time to even pour a bowl of cereal. When our mornings are such a rush, we ignore our stomachs begging for substance.

Who cares, lunch will be in a couple of hours and then you’ll be able to eat twice as much since you didn’t have any calories for breakfast, right? Wrong! Your body is screaming for food for a reason: It hasn’t had anything to eat for almost 12 hours.

A study done from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) looked at breakfast’s importance to good health. HSPH found that men who regularly skipped breakfast had a 27 percent higher risk of heart attack or death from coronary heart disease (CAD) than those who did eat a morning meal. This is a frightening thought and it makes you think what would the cause of an increase of CAD from not eating breakfast?

Not eating breakfast can cause:
  • An increase in appetite so many unhealthy foods become a quick grab.
  • Metabolism slows down considerably so any food eaten is quickly stored as fat.
  • There is also an increase chance of eating more and later in the evening giving little opportunity to burn off those extra calories.

It’s so interesting to think about a simple addition to your day like eating breakfast could help control obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other health problems. Many of these health concerns can be combated through regular meals, keeping blood sugar levels at a steady state and making the healthy food easier to grab than a quick bag of chips.

Another study posted by the American Heart Association concluded that eating breakfast showed significantly lower CAD issues in their subjects of the study. These findings make it apparent we should be grabbing something in the morning to help curb our hunger pangs for our health all day.

Michigan State University Extension’s has many programs to help individuals with living a healthy lifestyle long term. Experts from Michigan State University Extension make it possible to help you learn how to make strides to move closer to the healthiest lifestyle possible.

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