Breakfast: the most important meal of the day,
that is, if you want to be really obese.

Once upon a time, breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Those were the days when most Americans made a living at jobs that required them to use their muscles for more, during the course of a day, than just punching vending machine buttons for treats like rats in a Skinner box.

Those jobs still exist, some even on American soil. For those few, brave souls who still toil all day in the outdoor sun or in the heat of factory floors, and actually deserve to take "Labor" Day off, breakfast remains an important institution.

Traditional breakfasts combine simple sugars, a boatload (a highly technical medical term) of more complex carbohydrates, and a healthy serving of fat. Take, for example, pancakes with syrup and bacon - sugar in the syrup, the starchy goodness of pancakes, and the porcine fattiness that is bacon.

The simple sugars provide a readily available supply of efficiently metabolized energy so you can come out of the gate swinging, to mix a metaphor, at the beginning of the day. The carbohydrates, stacked three cakes high, take slightly longer to metabolize. The body can begin using energy from them after the energy from sugar has been exhausted. And the fat from the bacon provides a reserve of energy for later in the day.

But, what about the rest of us? What about the 99.999999999% of Americans whose jobs have descriptions that contain the sentence, "This position is mostly sedentary."? [1] And, what about the schoolchildren who get bussed off to K-12 warehouses for 8 hours a day and are actually scolded if they try to move from their seats?

There is a peculiar attitude regarding food in this country, a worry that people aren't getting enough to eat. Some believe this attitude to be a relic of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years of the early 20th century, when many actually didn't have enough food to eat. But, today, it's rare that a person has to struggle to meet their basic nutritional requirements from day to day. That isn't to say it doesn't happen, but rather to say that it happens far less frequently than people exceeding their caloric requirements day after day and overeating.

The importance of breakfast in modern-day, increasingly-obese American should be re-examined. The word itself is a compound of to "break fast," and this is telling, because that's exactly what it does. During the 8 hours (give or take)

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Why we need breakfast?
We want to hear your view. Write now!