Tuesday, July 23, 2013
When Mom told you to eat your breakfast
She was far wiser than you could have imagined, grasshopper. Turns out that first meal of the day serves a real purpose in your health cycle.
In an article released Monday in the journal Circulation, researchers found that men who skipped breakfast had a 27 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease than men who ate their morning meal - though we imagine that big daily plates of bacon and pancakes with syrup are not the ideal.Still, when all is said and done, the best recipe is to eat moderate amounts of good foods at least twice a day.
The researchers also found, using a large ongoing study of mostly white men, that those who ate late at night had a 55 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease. They didn't find an association with the number of times a day a person ate.
Those associations were true - if somewhat less so - when other habits and conditions that would cause coronary heart disease were factored in, said the researchers, from Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Snacking and skipping breakfast are common among Americans, the researchers noted. And such habits have been associated with weight gain, high blood pressure and diabetes, they wrote.
So they looked at the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an ongoing look at 51,529 men who are questioned every two years about their health and habits.
The men who did not eat breakfast were younger, more often single and more likely to smoke and less active than the other men. The late-night snackers were also more likely to smoke and to have hypertension and sleep less than seven hours a night, the researchers wrote.
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