Every time somebody talks about the importance of breakfast they usually quote some study to support their opinion. The fact is you can find a study to prove whatever point you want to make. Let's look at breakfast using some common sense.
I was raised on the Greek island of Evia till the age of 15. At the time I lived in Greece I thought cancer was a rare diseases because in my town I did not know of anyone that had cancer. In the Junior High school I went to, out of 350 kids, 3 or 4 were overweight, everybody else were thin (not because we did not have food to eat). Thin was the norm and guess what? Breakfast was not an important meal, a matter of fact most adults did not eat breakfast and if they did usually was a biscuit with their coffee. Kids usually had a cup of hot milk if we were hungry but our parent never told us we had to have breakfast.
My upbringing was one of the reasons why I question the importance of breakfast when I first got into nutrition, but I thought maybe the way I was raised was an exception. When I started doing research on other healthy regions around the world and looked at how they ate, breakfast was always a small or none existed meal. I find it funny how we are teaching everybody here to eat breakfast but when you look at healthy regions around the world, breakfast is not a big deal. This must raise some questions about the importance of breakfast?
Here is my next question. If breakfast is so important, then how come vast majority of people are not hungry in the morning? Remember, hunger is the way your body asks for food when it needs it. So what, your body is trying to sabotage its self? It needs food but is not telling you?
Here is one more reason why breakfast makes no sense. If you look at animals in the wild that eat of any significance, what do they do after eating? They rest. Why? Because resting after eating is the best thing you can do to aid digestion. A matter of fact I remember in Greece after eating a big lunch we always rested for couple of hours. Do you rest after eating breakfast?
I know this contradicts everything you have heard about breakfast, but if you take a closer look at the evidence like I did, you will see that breakfast makes absolutely no sense.
"Stavros Mastrogiannis is a 20 year veteran of the weight loss field with a completely different approach to weight loss. He is the owner of Olympus Personal Training & Weight Management and the author of Eat It All By Eating Right."
