Latest science behind the first meal of the day

Fashion, Health & Beauty by Denise McNamara

How are you finding the whole cooking at home thing night, noon and morning? Have you changed your eating habits? Will you have to go on a post-lockdown detox and diet when finally released from home-prison? Does it feel that your whole world revolves around the next meal?

In our house the kids were demanding a cooked breakfast every day of scrambled eggs, baked beans and toasted potato waffles.

So after going through a truckload of these three basic items in the first few weeks and finding eggs were becoming difficult to source, we had to return to our usual habit of cereal, berries and yoghurt for at least three days.

My daughter would then make breakfast on Thursday with either bagels with cream cheese, bacon or croissants with grilled ham, cheese and tomato or boiled eggs with wholemeal toast.

On Fridays and Saturdays, it’s back to their perennial favourite of the eggs, beans and waffles while on Sunday we go for the grilled sausages, bacon, beans, tomatoes – I sneak in some spinach but am usually the only taker.

When the lockdown first happened, it was reported that sales of eggs, loose tea, teapots and egg cups were booming as people settled into their tables for a more relaxed first meal of the day while working from home or home-schooling or the reality of having no work to go to has kicked in.

New research is giving you the thumbs up if an extended breakfast has been your habit during the pandemic.

A study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism by researchers at Lübeck University in Germany studied 16 men. They first ate a 250-calorie breakfast and a 990-calorie dinner, then reversed the calorie count with a large breakfast and a small dinner.

They found that on the days they had a high-calorie breakfast, their metabolism was working 2.5 times better by measuring diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT).

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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