Nutritionally Speaking: Breakfast Eaters Are Thin / Healthcare Costs Are So High and Still So Much Illness

Dear Meinig: I just don’t have time for breakfast, but I have heard that it is bad to skip it. Is It?. – T.W.

Dear T.W.: You wouldn’t get into your auto and start for San Francisco without putting gas in the old buggy. Starting a day without food is certainly no different. The time interval between dinner and breakfast for most is the longest stretch without food of your 24-hour day. For most, this amounts to ten or twelve hours.

A simple test we have presented to school teachers during numerous nutrition talks has been to suggest they have the class write down what they have had for breakfast–then compare the breakfast to the childrens’ grade levels. You guessed it! The big breakfast eaters, on the whole, had the best grades. Similar comparisons at an Air Force base showed conclusively that flight accidents and ground-crew mishaps were more prevalent in the non- or small-breakfast eaters investigations also showed that big breakfast eaters tend to have normal or below normal body weights, whereas non breakfast eaters, on the whole, have more of a tendency towards obesity.

Delightful things happen to families who hit the hay a little earlier each evening in order to allow time for a leisurely, good breakfast in the morning. It isn’t all sweetness and light the first day, but with a little practice you’ll witness more A.M. smiles and less of the usual morning crabbiness. How long have you been doing the morning rush and scramble?

 

Dear Dr. Meinig: I just read where health care expenditures in the country last year were over $100 billion. Why, then, do we have so much illness? – Virginia

 

Dear Virginia: In the first place, that money was not spent for health care but for sickness. We have an illness treatment system, not a health care program. When a decayed tooth is filled, when antibiotics rid us of any one of hundreds of infections, when a cancerous breast is surgically removed, all of these enable one’s health to be restored, but not a single one of these treatment methods did anything about getting at the cause of these diseases. Unfortunately, doctors are trained to treat symptoms of illnesses, not their causes. You see, Virginia, medicine has been busy all of these centuries taking care of sick people. There just hasn’t been any attention paid to healthy people and their potential problems.

A true health program would search for and anticipate the disease before it happened and would lay out a course of action to prevent its occurrence. Unfortunately, predictive medicine is being practiced by only a few today. The responsibility rests on you, the public. Such changes throughout the centuries have only come by way of people’s pressure.

We are the most overfed and undernourished people in the world. The destructive eating habits forced on us by the indiscretions of our past societies is becoming apparent. Not so apparent is the fact that each individual must be responsible for his own health; that he cannot purchase or buy it or have it given to him. Herein lies the next major advance in true health care. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Society is always taken by surprise by an example of common sense.” Your question, Virginia, indicates you are probing for the right answers. Your pursuit is encouraged.