The Big Breakfast Debate

How Breakfast Makes a Big Difference to Your Day

You’re probably tired of hearing, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” And you’d rather not hear it when you’re running late for school or work! But have you really thought about why breakfast is an important part of your day? We're about to settle the breakfast debate and show you why you should eat breakfast and why skipping it is a bad idea.

Why Breakfast is Important

As the word itself suggests, breakfast is the first meal you take after many hours of fasting. Nutritionist Adelle Davis famously stated back in the 1960’s: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.” Even today, that statement appears to remain true. Recent research has shown that you should be consuming about 15 to 25 percent of your daily energy intake at breakfast¹.

Eating breakfast improves fullness, reduces daily hunger, and enhances mental focus and hormonal balance². This combination results in more productivity, improved body composition, and better mood.

What Happens When You Skip Breakfast

When you skip breakfast, metabolic markers such as fasting glucose, A1C, LDL, blood pressure, abdominal obesity, and triglycerides shift towards being undesirable³. There is also a correlation of poor lifestyle habits such as smoking and drinking to those who skip breakfast as well as an overcompensated outcome at lunch³. Meaning, if you skip breakfast, you will make up for the deficit at lunch possibly canceling out the assumed desired benefits of skipping breakfast.

For those who believe in skipping breakfast because of fasting or whatever new fad is out there, just wait one minute!

A recent study found that although skipping breakfast resulted in weight loss over 24 hours it also increased inflammation markers such as IL-6. The higher inflammation could have detrimental long-term effects on body composition. It is also linked with higher rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease^4,5,6.

If you want to be more productive and better mood, then breakfast must be part of your daily routine⁷.

What’s the Best Thing to Eat at the Breakfast Table?

An ideal breakfast includes foods containing protein and fat, like buffalo, grass-fed beef, or chicken sausage. Having a low-glycemic breakfast helps to set up good neurotransmitters which will put you in a better mood. A low-glycemic breakfast avoids refined carbohydrates that elevate blood sugar. This type of breakfast also stabilizes blood sugar and allows you to go longer between meals before getting hungry.

This is the foundation of our famous Poliquin Meat and Nut Breakfast. We’ve been talking about it for years. We still get the best results in body composition and performance according to anecdotal reports and our personal experiences.

Final Words

The next time you hear about the breakfast debate, don’t get annoyed. There’s a lot of truth to breakfast being the most important meal of the day.

Make sure that you don’t give anyone a reason to keep reminding you. If you want your day to end well, start it right. Eating a healthy breakfast is the right way to start your day.