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.