Breakfast: Why is it the most important meal of the day?
Health & Fitness By KEMI ILORI
Tuesday, July 10, 2007

A healthy breakfast is the most important meal of the day. How many adult Nigerians know this fact and/or the reason? Have you noticed that a lot of people seem to think it is executive behaviour not to eat breakfast? It is so bad, that some people have that attitude that breakfast is for jobless or lazy people.

They have a perfunctory way of saying, "I don’t have time for breakfast; oh! Except at the weekends when I’m less busy!" This unfortunate trend is extended to children in some homes. Mothers do not have time to prepare breakfast for them. They are shooed off to school with snacks in their bags. The "no – breakfast" phenomenon, then unwittingly enters the second generation. Studies show that 50 per cent of adults over the age 40 skip breakfast.

This is double jeopardy, because the body is beginning to slow down already. You then cultivate the habit of not fueling it in the morning to jumpstart it.
What is breakfast? Breakfast is the first meal of the day. We sleep for six to eight hours. During that time, our body is running on existing fuel and nutrients which keep the body and its organs functioning properly. A lot of repair and restoration work is also going on. When we wake up, our primordial instinct is that we forage for food. This is because we have fasted during sleep and we need to break – fast . The name of this first daily meal is self-explanatory. After fasting all night long, you need to nurture your body with some good, high quality food.

How does our body use breakfast? One of the most important items that we need from our breakfast is energy. In addition to this, we need key nutrients that help our body to function properly. These are essential minerals and vitamins. A good breakfast will provide these. I had explained in a previous article, that glucose is the food currency that our body uses.

This is because it is burned to give us energy to do everything that we do, such as breathing, walking, talking, etc (you have heard the phrase, ‘I’m too tired to talk’. It means the person has used amost of his energy to do other things and finds it difficult to summon the energy to even talk!). You need energy to even digest the food you eat! It has been discovered that after love-making, digesting food is the second most energy-demanding normal activity that we engage in.

The carbohydrate that we eat is digested by the body and broken down to glucose so that the body can use it. This glucose is present in our bloodstream and accounts for about 0.1 per cent of our blood volume. By the time we wake up each morning, our blood glucose level would have dropped because we have gone without food. Breakfast supplies the glucose. Breakfast should be eaten soon after waking up. When our body recieves its energy supply from breakfast, it is very happy.

This is why carbohydrates are mood-elevating foods (note that carbohydrate foods with a low glyceamic index will modulate the rate of glucose release into the bloodstream and will prevent you from feeling hungry soon after breakfast). All the organs are alert, especially the brain, which uses a lot of glucose. Your brain is sharper and you can function properly. You are charged and rearing to go. It is like filling the tank of your car.

What happens when you do not eat breakfast? When the body is starved of glucose, it compensates by releasing the glucose stored in our muscle tissue and liver, called glycogen, (note that this is glucose without the nutrients that would have been in our breakfast meal). In an attempt to conserve energy, the body’s metabolism slows down and you use up less fuel. This is because the body is in a sort of “starvation mode” and wants to save the fuel it has (because it does not know how long the shortage is going to last!).

When you finally eat your first meal of the day, the body stores as much of the fuel as possible. This is like the panic buying of petrol during fuel scarcity. Over a long period, if you have a no-breakfast policy, you might become obese. This is because your “later-in-the-day” meals are stored as fat. The most efficient way of storing energy in the body, is by converting glucose to fat for storage, as well as storing fat from fatty food.

All these measures are taken by the body to "protect you". To ensure that you have enough fuel in the form of fat (since you permanently skip breakfast and are in starvation mode). In addition to habitually storing fat, the body metabolism is considerably shutdown, i.e. the body does not burn too much fuel. Breakfast–eaters usually have a high metabolic rate because the energy feedback mechanism knows there will always be fuel.

Breakfast and mental ability: Have you noticed that when you have been reading or doing mental work for a long time, you begin to feel hungry? Well the brain uses a lot of our energy. The brain is a very active tissue and uses 20 to 30 percent of the calories consumed each day. Breakfast is essential for providing the fuel the brain needs after fasting all night. A high carbohydrate breakfast is the best way to supply energy to the brain because it uses only glucose for energy. A high fat breakfast can leave you feeling fatigued and less imaginative.

Children who eat breakfast perform better in school. When we have poor nutrition, our thinking, memory, personality and intelligence can be affected. Such a case is the lack of supply of adequate glucose to the brain at the right time and in the right quantity. Adults may find themselves forgetting phone numbers, names of people they have known for years and where they put their keys.

To round up, it is important that you cultivate the habit of eating the right type of breakfast every morning. Your brain and body will serve you properly for longer. Start eating early in the day and stop eating early in the evening. Your breakfast should contain enough carbohydrate to fuel the early part of your day. Breakfast should not be a fatty meal. There are a lot of healthy carbohydrate foods with a low glycaemic index e.g. eat yams with steam vegetables as opposed to potato chips and eggs. Pap made from guniea corn and other such grains are a wonderful breakfast option.