“Breakfast it the most important meal of the day”, they always say. A new study further suggests its importance as skipping breakfast increases your chances to have a heart attack.
Older men who regularly skip breakfast have 27 percent chances of having heart attack than those who eat morning meal. Researchers believe that their finding should be applicable to everyone too.
Breakfast is suggested to be correlated with other precursors to heart problems like obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and more. Eric Rimm, one of the study authors at the Harvard School of Public Health, and his colleagues studied the data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study which has about 26,902 men with ages between 45 to 82 years old. The participants didn’t have any cardiovascular disease and cancer but after 16 years of follow-up, they found out that 1,527 of them have developed heart-related diseases. Others have developed BM, diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia as well.
Experts aren't positive, but here's what they assume: People who skip breakfast are more likely to be famished later in the day and eat larger meals. Eating heavier meals mean the body must process a larger amount of calories in a shorter span of time which can spike sugar levels in the blood and possibly lead to clogged arteries.
The researchers admitted that they didn’t ask the participants what they had for breakfast. They were not ready to pass judgment on whether eating a stack of syrupy pancakes, greasy eggs and lots of bacon is better than eating nothing.
Other experts agreed that it's hard to say.
Andrew Odegaard, a University of Minnesota researcher who has studied a link between skipping breakfast and health problems like obesity and high blood pressure wrote in his report, “We don’t know whether it’s the timing or content of breakfast that’s important. Generally, people who eat breakfast tend to eat a healthier diet.”
It was an observational study, so it's not intended to attest a cause and effect. But when done well, such studies can expose important health risks.
The study was published on the July 22 issue of online journal Circulation.
