Want to be healthier? Eat a nutritious breakfast. Scientists have now found that eating in the morning is more important than ever. It turns out that teenagers who consume a poor breakfast actually display a higher incidence of metabolic syndrome 27 years later; that's incentive to eat your Wheaties.
Metabolic syndrome is actually a collective term for factors that are linked to an increased risk of suffering from cardiovascular disorders. It encompasses abdominal obesity, high levels of harmful triglycerides, low levels of HDL, high blood pressure and high fasting blood glucose levels. Needless to say, it's important to understand what might cause metabolic syndrome in individuals.
In order to better understand what might lead to the syndrome, the researchers took a closer look at students in Lulea in 1981. They asked the students to answer questions about what they ate for breakfast. Then, 27 years later, the scientists gave the same participants a health check in order to investigate the presence of metabolic syndrome.
So what did they find? It turns out that young people who neglected to eat breakfast or ate a poor breakfast had a 68 percent higher incidence of metabolic syndrome as adults when compared with those who had eaten a substantial breakfast.
"Further studies are required for us to be able to understand the mechanisms involved in the connection between poor breakfast and metabolic syndrome, but our results and those of several previous studies suggest that a poor breakfast can have a negative effect on blood sugar regulation," said Maria Wennberg, one of the researchers, in a news release.
The moral of the story is to not skip breakfast. Not only could it affect your health now, but it could also have lasting consequences in the future.
The findings are published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.
