Breakfast has found a new place in this day and age. Along with the Siberian tiger and that bald eagle, the meal finds itself on the endangered species list.
It does still exist, of course. We have those Sunday morning brain cell re-growth breakfasts at 2:00 p.m. And then there’s those breakfast-for-dinner breakfasts that aren’t really breakfasts but we just call them that because we’re idiots. But these are all breakfasts in vain.
Those Sunday breakfasts are sympathy breakfasts, a lackluster attempt to reinstate and reminisce in the glory days we once had in breakfast-eating United States.
I’m talking about those days where everything was plastically happy, where parents were still together, where families were meaningful and we all sat around that table and eagerly spouted blissful mundane things to each other. Dust continues to collect on such times. Today, in our fast-paced, globally-warmed world, the reality of the matter is that almost no one eats breakfast anymore.
The Kellogg Corp., along with researchers from Michigan State University, looked at data collected from 2000’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and found that the typical person who eats breakfast would be an,”older, white non-smoking female who exercises regularly and is trying to control their weight.” This describes that category of women who I always see in the morning jogging around the block with their stupid little dog and their matching pastel suit. These women all rush down a bowl of Special K while drowning their morning grogginess in Mr. Coffee and shooting off to their cushy window office job. That’s not breakfast.
I couldn’t be any further from this description. I’m a young, half-white man who smokes all day and never exercises. But there are plenty of people who are not at all like me who never eat breakfast.
Take, for example, Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Aging and someone who hasn’t eaten breakfast in 20 years. He was recently profiled in a Los Angeles Times article denouncing the slogan, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” the catchphrase that has held hands with the meal since its invention. The article also points to Marion Nestle, a nutrition, food studies and public health professor at New York University, and also a fellow non-breakfast eating compadre.
Mattson goes as far as to claim that breakfast consumption may be worse than not eating it. He published a study in the Lancet in June of 2005 claiming that (at least on rodents) skipping a meal (breakfast) “increases glucose regulation, reduces blood pressure, and improves renal (kidney) function.” More importantly Mattson claims that a meal-skipping diet will heighten the resistance to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, as well as strokes and cancer. Ultimately, the rodents lived 30 percent longer.
Science like this is virtually unheard of. It seems as though researchers fear a retraction of the current common understanding of breakfast would be an embarrassment. But sooner or later as information of this sort proliferates around the globe, breakfast will no longer be an endangered species. It will be extinct.
Jan Gray is a senior journalism major.
