By Tracey Neithercott/Recipes by Robyn Webb, MS, LN

Did your mom always say that breakfast was the most important meal of the day? Turns out she was right. More and more researchers who study the morning meal are finding that breakfast plays a key role in healthy living. And yet many people sacrifice it in their rush to get out the door. “The average American skips breakfast, ” says Constance Brown-Riggs, MSEd, RD, CDE, CDN, registered dietitian, certified diabetes educator, and author of The African American Guide to Living Well With Diabetes. “You’re skipping breakfast and oftentimes you skip lunch as well, so by the time you do eat, you’re ravenous and overeat.” That’s not a good idea for a number of reasons, as researchers have come to understand.

Breakfast’s Benefits
As its name implies, the purpose of breakfast is to break the fast between dinner and lunch. Here’s what happens when you don’t eat a morning meal: Your body enters into a prolonged fasting state. It starts to believe that you won’t be eating any time soon. When you finally eat lunch, your body stores it as fat because it thinks, “I’d better save this for later. I don’t know when the next meal will come.” That, of course, leads to weight gain. When you break the fast in the morning, on the other hand, your body can use that food to power you through the day.

Aside from kicking your body into gear and keeping hunger at bay, why should you bother with breakfast? “The research shows that, without a doubt, students do better in school with breakfast, ” says Brown-Riggs. “It helps in terms of fitness.” It affects the mind, too: Breakfast eaters are more productive at work, have better problem-solving skills, and increased mental clarity.

Not only that, but people who eat breakfast tend to have a healthier diet overall. “We know, when we look at the characteristics of individuals who are breakfast skippers, that they get inadequate amounts of fruits and vegetables, ” says Heather Leidy, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology at the University of Missouri. “They are deficient in calcium and other minerals.” On average, breakfast skippers snack more often, eat more sugary, high-fat snacks, drink more soda, are more likely to overeat at night, and are more often overweight or obese than breakfast eaters. It’s important to note, though, that these findings so far have only demonstrated that there is some kind of link between missing breakfast and these other factors. “That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t prove causality, ” says Leidy. The big mystery is whether overweight or obese people skip breakfast in an effort to lose weight or if the act of skipping breakfast leads to obesity.

Either way, breakfast is especially important for people with diabetes. For someone on insulin, if there’s no food on board, that person runs the risk of hypoglycemia. Even if you use fast-acting insulin to cover carbs, you shouldn’t avoid breakfast. “What we know from research is that there’s much better glycemic control when a person’s carbohydrates are spread out, ” says Brown-Riggs.