New Study Says Skipping Breakfast May Stress Your Body Out So Much It Gives You a Heart Attack

The various health benefits of eating breakfast are already widely accepted: weight loss, lower blood pressure and cholesterol... cook up something really exciting and you can even help cure a mean case of the Mondays. Now, a new study also points out that eating breakfast is critical to keeping your heart healthy.

The study's subjects were elderly and middle-aged men, so we'll leave it to you to decide if this applies to you: Over a 16-year period, the group who skipped breakfast were 27 percent more likely to have a heart attack or to die as the result of coronary heart disease. The researchers blame a failure to "break" the "fast" we engage in while sleeping — which can mean stressing out our bodies so much that our organs start to suffer.

Of course, this may be a case of correlation as opposed to causation. The subjects who did not eat breakfast weren't exactly the picture of health otherwise. They were more likely to be "single, smokers, employed full-time, to drink more alcohol, were younger, and were less likely to be physically active." These were people, in other words, who didn't seem to have much interest in taking care of themselves. When the study controlled for these extraneous factors, the link between skipping breakfast and heart failure was reduced significantly.

The study also doesn't specify what kind of breakfast food you have to eat to achieve these heart-healthy results. Maybe we'll just use this as an excuse to keep treating ourselves to knock-off cronuts in the morning for the sake of our heart health. Yeah, right.