صبحانه: مهمترین وعده ی غذایی؟ Breakfast: The most important meal of the day?

Introduction Breakfast is often described as the most important meal of the day, providing as it does sustenance and energy (i.e., calories) for whatever activities lay ahead. As nutritionist Adelle Davis famously put it back in the 1960s: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.” (Sifferlin, 2013).1 According to the latest evidence, we should all be aiming to consume around 15–25% of our daily energy intake at breakfast (i.e., 300–500 calories for women and 375–625 for men; Spencer, 2017; though see also Betts et al., 2014). And yet the evidence from largescale surveys suggests that somewhere in the region of 18–25% of adults (Haines et al., 1996; Kant and Graubard, 2006; Spencer, 2017), and as many as 36% of adolescents in North America skip this putatively ‘most important’ meal (Seiga-Riz et al., 1998).2 There is, undoubtedly much cultural variation in the kinds of foods that different people like to eat at different times of day, as anyone who has stumbled across the sticky, slimy fermented soy bean dish known as natto at the breakfast buffet in Japan will know only too well. How could anyone contemplate eating that first thing in the morning? In fact, it would seem likely that there are more pronounced differences in how appropriate we find it to eat different foods at this time of day, as compared to at others, such as, for lunch or dinner, say. Despite these cultural differences, there is nevertheless a good deal of consistency within (and, on occasion, between) different cultures in terms of the kinds of items they choose to consume at the start of the day, not to mention growing interest in this meal (Cloake et al., 2017). There have, of course, also been significant changes over the course of history. What we in the West eat for breakfast today is certainly very different from what previous generations would have thought it appropriate to eat. For instance, the notion that breakfast cereals constitute standard fayre is something that has only been common practice since the closing years of the 19th Century / early 20th Century (see Gitlin and Ellis, 2012; Severson, 2016a, for a history of breakfast cereals). As we will see later, though, the last few years have seen a dramatic drop in sales of both breakfast cereals and orange juice, both of which would have been stalwarts of the breakfast table only a few decades ago. A large and growing body of scientific evidence now supports the claim that breakfast really is a very important meal. The first thing to take note of here is how the failure to eat something at the start of the day can have surprisingly serious health consequences for those concerned. For instance, Cahill et al. (2013) documented a 27% increase in coronary heart disease amongst those North American men who regularly failed to eat a meal at the start of the day.3 Though, on the negative side, eating high-fat breakfasts too often has recently been demonstrated to increase the risk of atherosclerosis (see McFarlin et al., 2016).