To breakfast or not to breakfast, the New York Times looks at the meal that begins our day. There has been quite a bit of interest lately on weather eating breakfast was important, or weather it helped us put off or put on pounds. The NY Times in a recent article looks at this important meal. Do you eat breakfast? If so, what? Most breakfasts include either breakfast cereals, eggs, meats rolls with butter or some other topping, fruit, juices and coffee. Others have dairy such as yogurt with fruit and depending on which country you live in, breakfast traditions may be quite different. Is breakfast as important as we believe or is what is in the breakfast more important. Some thoughts on breakfast foods. The typical way most start our day. Simple Carbohydrates such as those found in waffles, pancakes and bagels may actually cause us to crash and burn. What is crash and burn? If you eat simple carbohydrates, without any or with little protein, you will find yourself tired two hours later because the starches are broken down into sugars which cause an immediate spike in your blood sugar. Cortisol levels are also high in the morning, so your energy should be high, and accented when you have your cup of coffee. The burn is two hours later when your body metabolizes the sugar and leaves you with markedly lower energy. These types of carbohydrates are actually the ones that will turn to fat and can be addicting as well, so the myth of the breakfast or extra meal causing weight gain persists, since so many people eat the wrong foods in the morning. A better way to start our day. While breads and simple carbs will cause crash and burn, proteins will help us maintain energy, and if you work physically, what you eat in the morning can help fuel us and keep us satisfied until lunch time. This can include some simple carbohydrates (small portions), meats, some cheese (not too much), some fruit, with the emphasis on protein. Often, when we stop off somewhere to have a breakfast sandwich, a wrap with meat, some cheese and fruit on the side is a healthier and less weight building fuel, or how about that bagel sandwich, with the inside pulled out (less bread) with meat, egg, or meat, egg and some cheese which is somewhat higher in calories but will fuel you better than the bagel with creamed cheese which has less protein. A good recipe for energy Eggs on a raft (an old camping recipe) a la Charschan. This is a recipe that I use to make on campouts that is full of protein, low on carbs, and tastes great and is a great way to begin your day. Take a piece of bread, preferably whole grain or 15 grain Arnolds or Pepperidge farms. Tear out a large circle in the middle of the bread. Use a large pan or grill and put a tablespoon of butter or olive oil on the pan. Add the bread to the pan and crack open an egg and deposit it in the hole you made in the bread. As this cooks on medium heat, separate a slice of pepper jack, regular jack or Swiss cheese to the side, along with three or four thin slices of tomato. For a meat, you can use Canadian bacon, pork roll or any other breakfast meat. After about a minute, the bottom should be cooked and you can flip the bread over with the egg. After flipping over the bread, add the cheese, tomato, while grilling the meat on the side of the griddle. After about another minute, place the meat on top of the toast, turn off the heat and allow the bread to sit on the griddle for another 30 seconds to a minute. Then remove, serve with some fruit on the side. For extra hungry people, you can make two of these for breakfast however, one is sufficient even for people who perform strenuous work. Here is the article from the NY Times By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Americans have long been told that routinely eating breakfast is a simple habit that helps prevent weight gain. Skipping breakfast, the thinking goes, increases hunger throughout the day, making people overeat and seek out snacks to compensate for missing that first - and some would say most important - meal of the day. "Eating a healthy breakfast is a good way to start the day," according to the Web site of the United States surgeon general, "and may be important in achieving and maintaining a healthy weight." But new research shows that despite the conventional weight-loss wisdom, the idea that eating breakfast helps you lose weight stems largely from misconstrued studies. Only a handful of rigorous, carefully controlled trials have tested the claim, the new report, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found. And generally they conclude that missing breakfast has either little or no effect on weight gain, or that people who eat breakfast end up consuming more daily calories than those who skip it. But those trials have been largely overlooked, and their findings drowned out by dozens of large observational studies that have found associations between breakfast habits and obesity but no direct cause and effect, said Dr. David B. Allison, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Allison and his colleagues scoured the medical literature and found that the only long-term, carefully controlled trial that randomly assigned people to routinely eat or go without breakfast and then measured the effect on their body weight was published in 1992. That seminal study, carried out over 12 weeks at Vanderbilt University, had mixed results. Moderately obese adults who were habitual breakfast skippers lost an average of roughly 17 pounds when they were put on a program that included eating breakfast every day. And regular breakfast eaters who were instructed to avoid eating breakfast daily lost an average of nearly 20 pounds. Both programs included an identical amount of calories, and each caused people to lose more weight than a program in which a person's typical breakfast habits did not change. read more here