The Importance of Breakfast: Breakfast can help prevent strokes, heart attack and sudden death.
Advice on not to skip breakfast!
For those who always skip breakfast, you should stop that habit now!
You've heard many times that "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
Now, recent research confirms that one of the worst practices you can develop may be avoiding breakfast.
Why?
This is because the frequency of heart attack, sudden death, and stroke peaks between 6 a.m. and noon, with the highest incidence being between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
What mechanism within the body could account for this significant jump in sudden death in the early morning hours?
We may have an answer. Platelet - tiny elements in the blood that keep us from bleeding to death if we get a cut - can clump together inside our arteries due to plaque build up in the artery lining.
It is in the morning hours that platelets become the most activated and tend to form these internal blood clots at the greatest frequency.
However, eating even a very light breakfast prevents the morning platelet activation that is associated with heart attacks and strokes. Studies performed at Memorial University in St. Johns, Newfoundland found that eating a light, very low-fat breakfast was critical in modifying the morning platelet activation. Subjects in the study consumed either low-fat or fat-free yogurt, orange juice, fruit, and a source of protein coming from yogurt or fat-free milk.
So if you skip breakfast, it's important that you change this practice immediately in light of this research.
Develop a simple plan to eat cereal, such as oatmeal or Bran Flakes, along with grape juice or orange juice, and perhaps a piece of fruit.
This simple plan will keep your platelets from sticking together, keep blood clots from forming, and perhaps head off a potential heart attack or stroke.
So never ever skip breakfast!
(Courtesy of forwarded mail from CK Chang)