New study may mean breakfast is toast
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
There I was yesterday morning, dutifully following the orders of the nutrition police and eating breakfast (a doughnut, some M&M’s left over from the previous day’s breakfast and a large iced coffee), when I clicked open the L.A. Times and got hit by this shocker: “The Breakfast Hype: Be it eggs or a hearty bowl of oatmeal, morning fare has long been branded the most important meal. Now some scientists are saying: Not so.”
What will they tell us next? That spinach isn’t healthy? That a high-fat low-carb diet isn’t the best way to lose weight? That fat-free muffins can still make us heavy? That Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction after all?
So what’s wrong with breakfast? Nothing per se (in fact, any meal that allows doughnuts as a main course can’t be all bad). But you know that obesity epidemic everyone’s always whining about - well, the anti-breakfast faction says some adults might be better off skipping breakfast’s calories, particularly if they’re empty calories.
And, it’s alleged, breakfast’s evil ways can do more than make you fat. A Yale scientist studying rodents found that hunger made them smarter (no mention of whether they got grouchier), and a UC-Berkeley professor says that eating breakfast caused him to get up earlier in the morning because his slumber was disturbed by so-called “anticipatory activity.” (This was the first I’ve ever heard of that, but it makes great sense; my entire life, I realize now, has been compromised by it.)
“People get it exactly wrong,” professor Seth Roberts told the Times, “Breakfast is the most important meal to avoid.”
Never mind that skipping breakfast can lead to binging later on, or that many breakfast foods have calcium and whole grains that people aren’t getting later in the day. The important thing is that breakfast’s armor has been pierced.
That’s fantastic news for the 30 percent of people who don’t eat breakfast every day and are tired of being made to feel guilty. In fact, when one woman heard the news, she pumped her fist in the air and yelled “Yes!” as if she’d won the lottery.
But it’s too early to write it off altogether. Breakfast plays tough, and it can’t be long now until we start seeing “information” spots from the Froot Loops Industrial Complex.
