Eating Breakfast Boosts Your Brainpower

If I could give you only one piece of nutritional information that would improve your brain's function tremendously, I would give you this: Eat a GOOD BREAKFAST.

Wow, how profound is that statement? I mean, who would have guessed that eating food when you wake up and haven't eaten for the last 12 hours would help your brain work better? A monkey maybe? Monkeys ARE pretty clever. How clever are you? Do you eat a REAL breakfast? I didn't think so. Now who's clever monkeyman? I find it amazing that humans need scientific studies to know whether or not they should eat in the morning but monkeys figured it out ALLLLLLLL by themselves. Although, I guess they did technically beat us into space.

Why Should I Eat Breakfast?

Like I said before, your brain requires a steady supply of glucose and neurotransmitters to function optimally. When you wake up in the morning you probably haven't eaten in atleast 10 hours which means your body doesn't have any glucose or neurotransmitters readily available. Instead, your body has to dig into it's energy and protein stores in order to get them. This process is much slower and less efficient than converting food directly into fuel because your body doesn't want to dig into these stores since it thinks you might be starving and will need them for later. This means your brain will work about as well as a flashlight on a dying battery. You know, they get all flickery and then you try to shake them and scream "Come on! Work you piece of sh--!" They might work well for a few seconds again, but then flicker back to that dull, fading light. The funny thing is, most of us do the exact same thing with our brains in the morning, but instead of shaking our brains we try to juice them up with donuts and coffee. They work for about an hour, but then fade out mid-morning leaving us dumb, and starving for lunch.

You can avoid all this drama by EATING A GOOD BREAKFAST. A good breakfast primes your brain with glucose and neurotransmitters and takes you out of "starvation mode". It's like popping a couple of new batteries into that dying flashlight. By eating a good breakfast you say to your body "I have an abundance of good food to keep you running at peak performance, so use what I'm giving you right now to help me perform my best and get ahead". Or in general, to perform complex tasks at an optimum level. Whether you need to turn in a critical report to your boss by noon, absorb an astrophysics lecture on cosmic microwave background radiation, or make a bunch of sales calls to meet your weekly quota, you will perform these tasks BETTER and FASTER by eating a good breakfast because your brain will be operating on NEW BATTERIES. In time, you will outperform all the donut-eaters and coffee-drinkers around you because you will have the advantage of providing your brain with a burst of energy and focus that will last through mid-morning and into the lunch hour.

I've been mentioning "good breakfast" a lot in the last few paragraphs, but what exactly do I mean by a "good breakfast"? And why is it important? For starters, I obviously don't consider donuts and coffee a "good breakfast". In the next articles in this series I will tell you exactly what I mean, and explain to you why what you eat for breakfast has a tremendous impact on how clearly and effectively you'll think through the morning hours.

So here's the take-home message:

Your brain doesn't have enough fuel to run on when you wake up in the morning because you haven't eaten in HOURS. If you replenish its supply of glucose and neurotransmitters by EATING A GOOD BREAKFAST, your brain will have the fuel it needs and you'll be able to CONCENTRATE better, think FASTER, and think LONGER. In essence, breakfast MAKES YOU SMARTER in the morning.