For years, nutritionists, dietitians and other busybodies have told us that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. It’s a dogma that became written in stone, a virtual 11th Commandment. Thou shalt eat breakfast or thou shalt spend the rest of thy day without sufficient energy to accomplish thy tasks.
It was a canard fed to us by our parents as soon as we were old enough to dip a spoon into our Cocoa Puffs. These are, it should be pointed, the same parents who filled us with outrageous tales about fat men who slid down our chimneys toting sacks of presents, rabbits who hopped into our living rooms bearing baskets of multi-colored eggs and fairies who replaced our teeth with coins under our pillows. (While I gullibly fell for the first two lies, I never understood what fairies did with my teeth after they paid for them.)
Perhaps a healthy breakfast really is important for growing children. But there’s reason to believe that not only is breakfast NOT the most important meal of the day for adults, it may not be necessary at all.
At least that’s the contention of Dr. Matt Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, who says he hasn’t eaten breakfast in 35 years and, in fact, also skips lunch on a daily basis. According to a report in The New York Times, he eats “all of his daily calories (about 2,000) in a six-hour window starting in the afternoon.” It’s a regimen, the story notes, that “may lower cancer risk and help people maintain their weight.”
“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty clear that our ancestors did not eat three meals a day, plus snacks,” he points out.
I’m not a neuroscientist and probably never will be, but Dr. Mattson’s theory is somewhat similar to my own.
My belief is that eating breakfast in the morning merely serves to alert your stomach that you’re awake, which, in turn, causes it to grumble for even more food the rest of the day. So before noon on most mornings all I eat is a sandwich consisting of rye bread, a schmear of yogurt-based margarine and a dollop of jam. My only other sustenance until dinner is whatever I get from digging out those little rye seeds that get stuck between my teeth.
Nutritionists could be right about the importance of breakfast, I suppose. For me, though, skipping all the work of making breakfast, eating it and cleaning up after it leaves extra time for something much more important.
Sleeping.
Contact this columnist at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com
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