Warning: Could Skipping Breakfast Be Making You Ill?

Has anyone ever warned you that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ as you opted to run out of the door with an empty stomach in the morning? Many pieces of advice such as this have turned out to be old wives tales or myths of one sort or another. This piece of advice, however, seems to have a lot of truth in it.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Medicine in the United States have recently uncovered evidence that men who do not eat breakfast are at a greatly increased risk of developing diabetes at some point in their lives.

This study, published recently in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition seems to expose a strong link between skipping meals and having an increased risk of contracting a diet-related form of the disease – type 2 diabetes.

The study showed that men who walk out of the door in the morning with nothing in their stomachs were as much as 20 percent more likely to contract type 2 diabetes in their lives than those who take time to ensure that they eat a healthy breakfast first thing in the morning.

It’s not just a case of when these men eat either, but a case of what. Iaian Frame, Diabetes UK’s director of research notes that whilst eating three balanced meals every day is in fact beneficial for your health and reduces your risk of contracting type 2 diabetes, the research is not clear about what constitutes a healthy breakfast.

Diabetes UK recommends that all men (and women) should eat a healthy balanced diet that includes plenty of fruit and vegetables and is low in salt, fat and sugar. This should apply to breakfast as well as to all other meals.

 

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