The Health Effects of Skipping Breakfast

2013-08-26 09:38:19

Most of us have been told from somewhere or other that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and should never be skipped. Yet so many people do just that! Recent research presented at The Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco provides sound rational for this commonly held perspective. They looked at nine non diabetic, overweight or obese, women averaging twenty nine years of age and assessed whether there were any differences in their insulin levels depending on whether they ate or skipped breakfast.⁽¹⁾ They were assessed on two separate occasions, separated by one month in between. Women were randomly assigned to either breakfast or no breakfast, followed by a standardized lunch four hours later. The following month they had the women switch assignment. Blood was collected every 30 minutes after lunch for three hours and tested insulin as well as glucose levels. The results were significantly higher increases of insulin and glucose after lunch in the women that skipped breakfast. These results suggest that skipping breakfast may contribute to chronic insulin resistance and may lead to the development of diabetes in the future. Others studies looking at how skipping breakfast affects human health have also found metabolic derangements.^(2,3) One of these assessed the diet of a group of 9-15year old and followed up nearly 20 years later finding that those that skipped breakfast in both childhood as well as adulthood had a larger waist circumference, higher fasting insulin, total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol concentrations than those who generally ate breakfast throughout their life.⁽²⁾ The other study followed a large group of men for 16 years, initially free of Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, and found men who skipped breakfast had a 21% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than men that consumed breakfast.⁽³⁾ Bottom line, breakfast is important to your health so start making time if you don’t already and for all you parents out there, do your best to encourage your kids to create a healthy eating routine at a young age.