The Importance of Breakfast

A Vietnamese idiom states that “Breakfast is a King’s meal, lunch is a friends’ meal, and dinner is a beggars’ meal.” This phrase emphasizes the importance of breakfast as it relates to our health and well-being. However, even with perfectly good reasons to eat breakfast, there are people who do not believe that this meal is important. There are many reasons a person should eat a nutritious breakfast everyday: it helps fuel the body and gives person energy throughout the day, it helps people to maintain a healthy weight, and it increases the life-expectancy rate for individuals. 

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To begin with, breakfast plays an important role in waking people up after eight hours of sleep.  After drinking a full glass of water, people should eat something to wake up organs that have been resting for a long period of time.  In addition, breakfast is like fuel; it is a main ingredient to produce an efficient working day because eating breakfast can increase a person’s ability to focus on a task.  When people have energy, they tend to feel that they can meet the challenges of the day.  Even though some people tend to feel that it is only “breakfast”, it does not mean it is a fast meal. People need to give breakfast some considerationand must make sure that their meal is high-fiber and low-glycemic. For example,their breakfast should include foods like oatmeal, egg whites, turkey, and chicken. However, most people’s first choice for breakfast is cereal. Although advertisements promote cereal as a good food for breakfast, it actually contains a lot of sugar that is not good for people’s health. Instead of giving people long-term energy, sugar is just a contemporary solution because it has to do with a rapid drop of blood sugar after the brief energy rush of a sugary meal.

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Another benefit of eating breakfast is it helps people maintain a healthy weight.  If a person is on a diet to lose weight, they may think that they can skip meals in a day as a good way to lose weight.  However, it is a totally a wrong idea because skipping breakfast can lead to binge eating. According to Susan Kraus, MS, RD, registered dietitian at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, “eating breakfast prevents you from bottoming out and getting too hungry”. In addition, eating breakfast gives people’s metabolism a boost. After a long sleep, nothing is left in our body, so our body tends to retain calories it can. Consequently, eating breakfastcan stimulate people’s metabolism to work harder and burn more calories. Conversely, skipping a nutritious breakfast can decrease abilities work hard of metabolism, and it tend to burn calories slowly. When people skip a breakfast, they crave at the next meals, and they are going to eat more than their stomach can handle. Unfortunately, these behaviors can lead to obesity or uncontrollable weight gain.

Moreover, eating a healthy breakfast everyday, breakfast-eaters feel better mentally and physically than non-breakfast eaters. Hence the expression, "An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but a healthy breakfast may keep the reaper at bay, too." According to studies, breakfast eaters tend to avoid fatal habits like smoking and drinking; their body can ward off diseaselike diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular. Therefore, eating breakfast can prevent bad habits from developing and diseases from affecting people’s health. People who eat breakfast probably extend their lifetime.

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Conversely, some people do not believe that eating breakfast is important. They think eating breakfast every morning is a time-waster. They believe that it is not food but more sleep that makes for a better day.  They think that drinking a cup of coffee can make them wake-up just as well as breakfast.  Their argument is that caffeine can provide a lot of energy for both waking up and meeting the challenges of the day. People are also scared of gaining weight if they eat regularly three meals per day. Because of those excuses, some people tend to avoid breakfasts despite its importance, but they do not know that their attitudes and opinions can decrease their lifetime.

Even though some people think breakfast is not an important meal in a day, it actually has an enormous role in helping people energize for a new day. In addition, the idea that eating breakfast might incur weight gain is untrue. On the contrary, people who have a nutritious breakfast everyday probably keep their healthy shape. Eating breakfast can also increase life expectancy. Therefore, having been informed on the benefits of eating breakfast, people should change their wrong ideas about breakfast to make their life become healthier and better.

Causes of Obesity

Obesity is one of the most common diseases in the world. Currently, more than one third of adults (35.7%) in the United States are obese. This statistic means that in the long run, people will have high chances of getting a serious disease, such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. There are many reasons leading to obesity, such as consuming a lot of fast food due to busy lifestyles, genetics combined with bad eating habits, and emotional overindulging.  Therefore, it is important to make people aware of the bad habits that can lead to obesity.

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    Because life can be busy for many people, instead of following healthy diets every day, their first, quick and easy choice is to eat fast food. Most people are aware of how much fatty acids are contained in a regular fast food portion.  However, it is hard to avoid the convenience of fast food, due to people's busy routines and hectic lifestyles. Unfortunately, the poor eating habits of adults tend to influence the food choices of their children. Consequently, fast food is an unhealthy food choice because it tends to include a high number of calories, saturated fats, and carcinogens. All of these ingredients can damage one’s organs. Furthermore, most fast foods are fried in corn oil, which has a lot of fructose, which is a form of sugar. This type of sugar makes consumers want to eat more and more fast food, and this oil also contains trans fats which are as bad for blood cholesterol as saturated fats. Therefore, fast foods do not only make adults and children obese, they also leads to serious future health problems such as high cholesterol and diabetes.

Another leading cause of obesity that many people are not aware of is genetics, combined with poor eating habits. Obesity can pass from one generation to the next, or it can skip generations. With the genes one inherits, combined with a bad-eating routine, a person can be at a high risk for obesity.  Many people with a genetic disposition towards obesity do not realize that it can be the little things that people do everyday, like eating snacks between meals, sitting too long to watch television or a computer that can increase their poor health risk.  Furthermore, being inactive for a long time combined with bad genes can control a person’s shape. Although many people have a normal diet, they can still have a high chance of being obese because of engaging in little to no exercise on a regular basis. Exercising can help a person release a lot of extra energy, which burns fat, but it also helps a person have a good shape and be healthy.

Last, but not least, emotional eating can be a major reason for the high rate of obesity in our society. Emotional eating is when people who are upset and depressed lose control of what they eat. When in one of these states, they tend to eat more on a continuous basis. If a person does not receive help for their depression, they might continuously gain weight as a result. Consequently, the bulk of those extra pounds can be concentrated around their waists, which may lead to poor self-esteem. Because obese people are usually shy and embarrassed whenever they want to contact other people, weight gain can have increased emotional effect. Unfortunately, many people who suffer from emotional eating tend to spend their life isolated, where no one can see and criticize them. With that mindset, they actually decrease their chances of losing weight. In fact, they tend to gain weight uncontrollably.

In conclusion, obesity is an avoidable disease that can lead to serious health problems. It can also cause other diseases, poor health, and low self-esteem. Because fast food, a poor daily diet, and emotional eating habits can lead to obesity, they should be avoided if possible. In order to reduce the risk of obesity, people should eat a healthy diet and exercise everyday, especially if they want to be healthy and have good self-esteem