Food & Drink
FinanceHarvard Says Eat your Breakfast
Unlike most people I consider myself to be a morning person. I get a lot done before 10 AM every day. After that it is pretty much downhill from there.
Considering my proclivity towards morning activities it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m a big breakfast guy too. I’d do the full English breakfast every day if I had the time and my body had the metabolism to keep up.
It amazes me how many people don’t eat any breakfast. A lot of people I talk to simply skip breakfast altogether and sometimes even lunch as well. This isn’t a heart-healthy decision according to the May 2008 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter. The Letter reports that breakfast reduces your risk for heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and heart failure. If that isn’t a good reason to start eating breakfast I don’t know what is. According to the Letter:
A host of mostly small studies show that eating breakfast, as compared with skipping it, makes for smaller rises in blood sugar and insulin after all of the day’s meals and snacks. Smoothing out the blood sugar and insulin roller coaster can help reduce levels of harmful LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. It can also curb the appetite.
There are so many great things that you can eat for breakfast too. I’m sure that the full English breakfast I mentioned earlier wasn’t the optimal breakfast Harvard had in mind. The Harvard Heart Letter suggests the following items heavy in whole grains, fruits, and healthy protein:
- a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal topped with fruit and walnuts
- a bowl of high-fiber, whole-grain cereal such as Fiber One, Shredded Wheat, or Cheerios with milk and sliced banana, strawberries, blueberries, or other fruit
- 6 or 8 ounces of 1% yogurt with blueberries and sunflower seeds
- a whole-grain English muffin with peanut butter
- an omelet made with one egg and one egg white, or egg substitute, served with whole-grain toast and orange slices
- a smoothie made with milk, yogurt, orange or pineapple juice, strawberries or blueberries, and banana, plus some oat bran, ground flax seeds, or wheat germ for extra fiber and healthful oils.
- Buckwheat pancakes. I added this last one because pancakes for breakfast is one of the greatest pleasures in life.
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