Doctors should eat breakfast to prevent heart disease

Men who skipped breakfast had a higher risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) compared with men who did not; in addition, compared with men who did not eat late at night, those who ate late at night had a higher CHD risk.

However, these associations appeared to be mediated by body mass index, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes.

Men in middle age and beyond who skip breakfast or eat late at night may be at greater risk of developing coronary heart disease, researchers found.

Male health professionals who said they regularly skipped breakfast were 27% more likely to die during 16 years of follow-up, according to Leah Cahill, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues, who adjusted for diet, demographics, physical activity, television watching, and amount of sleep, reports MedPage. And those who said they ate late at night were 55% more likely to die.

Both relationships, however, fell shy of statistical significance after further adjustment for body mass index, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes, "suggesting that eating habits may affect risk of coronary heart disease through pathways associated with these traditional risk factors," they reported online in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

The present study provides evidence to support a recommendation of daily breakfast eating by clinicians and health authorities to prevent coronary heart disease.

Previous studies have demonstrated associations between skipping meals and excess weight, dyslipidemia, hypertension, insulin resistance and diabetes, but a possible association with coronary heart disease had not been explored.

Cahill and colleagues examined the relationship between coronary heart disease risk and skipping breakfast and other eating habits using data from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS), an ongoing investigation of male health professionals.

The current analysis included 26,902 men ages 45 to 82 who were free from cardiovascular disease and cancer in 1992, which served as baseline. At that point, 13% reported not eating breakfast and 0.2% said they ate late at night. Through follow-up, there were 1,527 incident cases of coronary heart disease, defined as nonfatal MI or fatal coronary heart disease.

 The number of times the men ate per day was not associated with the risk of coronary heart disease, even though previous analyses of this cohort have shown relationships between eating frequency and weight gain and type 2 diabetes.