Meal

If I were to choose a meal to skip it would be the lunch.

If anything, breakfast should be the last one out.

To understand how breakfast gets in the way of keeping us healthy, we should take a look at the scholarly medical literature. A growing body of evidence shows that breakfast has important effect on the expression of "clock genes" that regulate our body's post-meal glucose and insulin responses. The field of body's inner clock, including molecular mechanisms controlling our circadian rhythm, is in fact the subject of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The case for a breakfast has been elegantly demonstrated by a Tel Aviv University study, in which 18 healthy volunteers and 18 obese diabetes volunteers took part in a test day featuring breakfast and lunch, and then a separate day featuring only lunch. In both healthy and diabetic subjects, having breakfast jump-starts specific "clock genes" that lead to better glucose control and more efficient weight loss. Breakfast skipping, on the other hand, has dire consequences on the clock-controlled gene expression.

In short, breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day.

For many, it's often well-nigh necessary to have three meals to keep the brains well-stoked all day. I'm not so sure. From time to time, lunch slows me down, rather than speeding me up. I had raw carrots for lunch before my running yesterday, for example, and ended up cursing it for the stomachache during the race. I tried sandwich today but could not beat the post-lunch slump during the medical conference. In the end, I should probably skip lunch to get away from the dip, I told myself.