Breakfast or No Breakfast

Can eating less make you fatter? Find out how it can.

LEWIS Carroll (1832-1898) reflected in his poem Through the Looking Glass the common presumption on how obesity develops in a person over eating. The concept is as simple as basic mathematics: the more you eat, the more you get fat.

Thus, meal skipping becomes a logical way to go. Since those in active work cannot afford a full day skip, workers often skip breakfast more commonly than lunch or supper.

A recent study that Monika Arora of Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth and colleagues conducted in New Delhi, India, seemed to suggest that the opposite is true. The results published in BMC Public Health (October 2012) reported that more children who regularly skip breakfast get more obese (22.9 percent) than those who breakfast daily (14.6 percent) or only sometimes (15.2 percent). And apparently these were significant only among boys than among girls.

Such results seem to contradict what appears to be logical in the dynamics of food eating. Can eating breakfast prevent obesity more than not eating breakfast at all?

The same study, however, provided the answer to this question through results that may be peculiar only to schooling children in New Delhi; and not necessarily among Filipinos, or Cebuanos as the case may be. [Click to find out why]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 10 April 2013.

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