Have you ever heard someone say, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day", or give you advice about why it's vital to start the day with a healthy breakfast? It seems that this meal, for many of us, is necessary for our day to start well, but is it really that important?
The word "breakfast" comes from "breaking the fast"— the idea of ending the period in which we don't eat during the night. The regeneration process that takes place while we sleep consumes some of our natural food reserves. Breakfast gives us an opportunity to replenish those reduced stores of things like protein and calcium. So, in that way, a healthy breakfast makes sense.
There are also many often-quoted studies which seem to connect a state of being overweight with not eating breakfast. In fact, it leads many health experts to advise a healthy breakfast to not only control but also lose weight. In a US study, 50,000 people were monitored over seven years, and those who ate a healthy breakfast were found to have a lower BMI (体重指数), which seems to suggest that breakfast may indeed help people maintain a healthy weight.
But it might not be as simple as that. Alexandra Johnstone, professor of appetite research at the University of Aberdeen, suggests those who do not have breakfast might be less aware of healthy diets and nutrition, and people who eat breakfast might have a healthier lifestyle overall exercising and not smoking, for example. And he also points out that with the rise in popularity of intermittent (间歇性的) fasting to lose weight, there may also be some benefits to not eating breakfast, like improving blood sugar control and lowering blood pressure.
So, while breakfast has its benefits, it might not be the most important meal. It seems that a healthy lifestyle with a balanced diet might be more important for many of us than just one single meal.
