Cut your Risk of Diabetes and Obesity…Eat Breakfast!

You’re running late. Just enough time to throw on some clothes, kiss your spouse goodbye, and grab your car keys on the way to work.

Big mistake

If you can’t tell what was missing from that above description of so many of our mornings during the week, you may be sending yourself to an early grave, or at the very least a life awash with high medical bills.

Let me explain

Skipping breakfast has been shown to cause a whole host of problems—from weight gain, to fatigue, to irritability—but new research shows that not grabbing a some A.M. nourishment could increase your risk for diabetes and obesity.

So how in the world can NOT eating lead to obesity?

Studies show that people who don’t eat breakfast have higher body fat, particularly belly fat, which is a major risk factor for diabetes and heart attacks, and tend to eat more than their morning-eating counterparts.

So what does this have to do with diabetes?

It’s all about insulin resistance. See, the body uses sugar for energy…to feed your cells. But those sugars require insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, which attaches little “hooks” called insulin receptors on the surface of cells to drive the sugar in. When insulin can’t attach its hooks it’s called insulin resistance and stops the sugar from entering.

A recent study using overweight women as subjects found that those women were far more likely to develop insulin resistance several hours after skipping breakfast! This caused more insulin to be produced, and as a result, the higher levels of insulin caused:

Of course, not all breakfasts are created equal. Highly processed foods, fried foods, or ones with added sugar also case a spike in blood sugar. Oatmeal and other breakfast cereals with whole grains are excellent choices as a result.