Improve Your Life

Healthy Habit 1: Eat Breakfast Every Morning

Breakfast eaters are champions of good health. Research shows people who have a morning meal tend to take in more vitamins and minerals and less fat and cholesterol. The result is often a leaner body, lower cholesterol count and less chance of overeating.

"That one act [of eating breakfast] seems to make a difference in people's overall weight," says Melinda Johnson, RD, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association (ADA). She says breakfast can hold off hunger pangs until lunchtime and make high-calorie vending machine options less enticing.

Not only that, researchers at the 2003 American Heart Association conference reported that breakfast eaters are significantly less likely to be obese and get diabetes compared with people who skip breakfast.

Another study in the International Journal of Food Science and Nutrition showed that people who consumed breakfast cereal every day reported feeling better both physically and mentally than those who rarely ate cereal in the morning.

For kids, breakfast appears to enhance alertness, attention and performance on standardized achievement tests, the ADA reports.

To get the full benefits of breakfast, the Mayo Clinic recommends a meal with carbohydrates, protein and a small amount of fat. Its experts say that because no single food gives you all the nutrients you need, eating a variety of foods is essential to good health.

Yet, with so much scientific support that breakfast does the body good, many people still make excuses not to eat in the morning. They include not having enough time and not feeling hungry. For these people, Johnson suggests tailoring breakfast to the day.

"When I'm getting ready in the morning, I don't really want to take the time to eat breakfast because that would mean sacrificing sleep," Johnson says. "So I bring my breakfast with me, and I know I have an hour when I'm reading e-mails in the office when I can eat it. By that time, I'm hungry because I've been up for almost a couple of hours."