DIET & FITNESS

Can you halt the march from thin to fat?

A study published in the October 4, 2005 Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzing data from 4,000 adults accumulated over the past 30 years, predicts that 9 out of 10 men and 7 out of 10 women will become overweight. Another installment of the monumental Framingham Study of adult, white Americans (51.9% women) all living in the same community – this report covered data from 1971 to 2001. The authors discouraging conclusion: long-term risks for white Americans developing obesity are very high.

Can you do anything to counteract the trend? When your pants get tighter is a bigger size the only answer? Once you start gaining weight, can you STOP?

YES! You can stop the “middle-age spread” in its tracks. DON’T STOP READING . . . this is NOT going to turn into another “starve and sweat” weight-control program – quite the opposite. The best way to keep from becoming overweight is to eat more, a LOT more – for breakfast!

In April 2005, the National Weight Control Registry reported that the vast majority of the 3000 people they studied who succeeded in losing 30 pounds – and keeping it off for at least three years – ate a substantial breakfast. Studies from as long ago as 1992 (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) and as recently as September 2005 (The Journal of the American Dietetic Association) support this finding.

Professor of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, G. Harvey Anderson agrees that breakfast eaters are usually lighter in weight than people who skip the morning meal.

How big a breakfast should you eat? In a study that tracked almost 2,400 girls for 10 years, the Maryland Medical Research Institute found that girls who ate breakfast regularly – particularly one that includes cereal – were thinner than those who ate little or nothing in the morning. Bruce Barton, the CEO of the Maryland Institute advised teenage girls that NOT eating breakfast was the worst thing they could do if they hoped to avoid gaining weight.

Blueberry pancakes and maple syrup may not sound like diet food, but many researchers believe that you should eat whatever you want for breakfast. The two forms of abnormal food intake most often seen in obesity -- binge eating and night eating -- may benefit from eating a high calorie meal early in the day.

That breakfast can help hold off obesity is not a recent discovery, however. Dr. A. J. Stunkard’s 2003 report on binge and night eating (cited above) is just a continuation of his work – begun in the 1950s. The pace of modern life might have borne the blame for skipped breakfasts in years gone by, but the seriousness and the extent of the consequences of the obesity epidemic, at present, may finally get the attention of those of us who don’t want to buy bigger pants.

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Stunkard AJ, Allison KC. Two forms of disordered eating in obesity: binge eating and night eating. Int J Obes Relat Metabol Disord 2003 Jan; 27 (10: 1-12.
Pereira MA. 43rd Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention; American Heart Association. 2003.

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