Breakfast: It's the most important meal of the day.
Such pronouncements carry the aura of nutritional religion: carved in stone, not to be questioned. But a few nutritionists and scientists are challenging this conventional wisdom.
The new mascot of the Warrior diet? We hope so.
They're not questioning the practice of sending children off to school with some oat bran or eggs in their belly. They acknowledge the many studies reporting that children who eat breakfast get more of the nutrients they need and pay more attention in class.
They do say, however, that the case for breakfast's benefits is far from airtight — especially for adults, many of whom could stand skipping a meal.
"For adults, I think the evidence is mixed," says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who hasn't eaten breakfast in years because she is just not hungry in the morning.
"I am well aware that everyone says breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I am not convinced," Nestle wrote in her book, What to Eat. (She later received many emails from readers telling her that they were relieved to hear it.) "What you eat — and how much — matters more to your health than when you eat."
A few scientists go further. They say it may be more healthful for adults to skip breakfast, as long as they eat carefully the rest of the day.
"No clear evidence shows that the skipping of breakfast or lunch (or both) is unhealthy, and animal data suggest quite the opposite," wrote Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging — and possibly the ultimate anti-breakfast iconoclast — in the medical journal The Lancet last year. Advice to eat smaller and more frequent meals "is given despite the lack of clear scientific evidence to justify it."
Mattson hasn't eaten breakfast in 20 years, since he started running in the mornings. He says he's healthy and has never felt better.
He admits his studies are still preliminary. But already his findings have attracted a cadre of followers who started to skip breakfast once they heard of his results. Meanwhile, a diet plan that involves breakfast skipping — the Warrior Diet — is attracting followers worldwide...
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Joe Must Go
"Joe Torre has to go. Someone I know and trust in baseball said Torre deserves to go out on his own terms, and that's about the only reasonable argument I heard yesterday for keeping him another year. But that just isn't enough. Torre has known the score for 11 years, known it ever since he took the job managing the Yankees. As it is, he's already gotten to stay through five straight failures, a privilege that never would have been accorded anyone else.
The standards are different around George Steinbrenner's Yankees -- and they still are Steinbrenner's Yankees -- than everywhere else. They tell you often that anything less than a World Series championship is considered a failure. Taking them at their word, how can they keep Torre?
His Yankees have now failed six straight times. So by their own standards, the highest-paid manager has done no better in six years with $1 billion worth of talent than you or I would have done.
Worse still, the most miserable failure was the most recent one, where Torre's $200 million team didn't show up in Detroit. Torre's team lacked energy, it lacked any sort of swagger and, ultimately, it lacked hits and runs and was blown out of Motown. The Yankees looked like they expected to lose to talented young Jeremy Bonderman, and I can't blame them if they did. If they can't dent Kenny Rogers, how were they supposed to touch Bonderman?" - Jon Heyman, SI.com
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