We are currently living in an era in which everything is progressing rapidly, so skipping various things is usually considered "normal", up to a point. One of those frequent jumps have to do with breakfast.
And breakfast is not only important, but when the person eats something very poor or even skips breakfast, you may be at risk of cardiovascular diseases such as smoking, cholesterol or sedentary lifestyle
This is warned by a study conducted by the National Center for Cardiovascular Research Carlos III of Spain (CNIC) and published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The study "Progression and Early Detection of Atherosclerosis" led by the general director of the CNIC, Valentín Fuster, does a long-term monitoring of the health of 4,000 middle-aged people who were controlled to determine the prevalence and progression of latent atherosclerotic lesions (called "subclinical" because they show no symptoms).
The researchers studied the association of these lesions with molecular and environmental factors, such as eating habits, physical activity, biorhythms, psychosocial characteristics and exposure to environmental pollutants.
The aim of the study, which was carried out in collaboration with Banco Santander, was to characterize the association between different breakfast patterns and cardiovascular risk factors, and, in particular, if skipping the normal breakfast is associated with subclinical atherosclerosis.
For this purpose, the presence of atherosclerotic plaques in different regions was analyzed: carotid and femoral arteries, aorta and coronary arteries, in a population without a history of cardiovascular disease, explains the CNIC in a note.
In this work, 20% of the participants ate a breakfast with high energy value (20% of daily calories), 70% a breakfast of low energy value (between 5 and 20% of daily calories), and 3 % ate very little or nothing (5% of daily calories) and barely spent 5 minutes at breakfast: they just had coffee or orange juice or even nothing.
In addition, the CNIC researchers point, this last group is characterized by following a less healthy diet and a higher prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors.
With studies of ultrasound technology (ultrasound) vascular, the researchers observed that those who skipped breakfast had 1.5 times more atherosclerotic plaques and an affectation in several regions of up to 2.5 times higher than those in the group that ate a breakfast energetic.
And all this, regardless of the presence of risk factors and unhealthy habits, explains Dr. Irina Uzhova, CNIC researcher and first author of the work.