Breakfast and Mental Wellness

As we all know, skipping breakfast is not good for the body, affecting nutrient supply and energy balance throughout the day.

A new study from the University of Tokyo in Japan recently found that breakfast also affects mental health.

People who don’t have time or are not used to eating breakfast are more likely to experience negative emotions such as anxiety and depression. The results showed that people who ate breakfast only once a week or skipped breakfast had a 2.9-fold increased risk of developing depressive symptoms compared with those who ate breakfast at the same time every day. The less frequently you eat breakfast, the higher your risk of depression!

Experts have called for the rising incidence of depression globally, and from a public health perspective, eating breakfast would be a healthy and economical way to reduce this risk.

In addition to whether you eat breakfast or not, the style of breakfast will also affect your mood! The breakfast that modern people eat is high-fat and high-carbs, and there are many processed foods that make us ingest too much fat, which will cause a burden on our health.

A study in 2008 pointed out that if you eat a fast-food breakfast, such a high-fat breakfast will increase the oxidative stress of the metabolic syndrome group, and oxidative stress is one of the culprits of many subsequent chronic diseases!

Therefore, we not only have to eat breakfast every day, but also choose a nutritionally balanced breakfast!

References:

O’Sullivan, T. A., Robinson, M., Kendall, G. E., Miller, M., Jacoby, P., Silburn, S. R., & Oddy, W. H. (2009). A good-quality breakfast is associated with better mental health in adolescence. Public Health Nutrition, 12(2), 249-258.

Pengpid, S., & Peltzer, K. (2020). Skipping breakfast and its association with health risk behaviour and mental health among university students in 28 countries. Diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity: targets and therapy, 13, 2889.

Zahedi, H., Djalalinia, S., Sadeghi, O., Zare Garizi, F., Asayesh, H., Payab, M., ... & Qorbani, M. (2020). Breakfast consumption and mental health: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. Nutritional neuroscience, 1-15.