Fatty Foods Washington DC

A new study says that it’s fine to have eggs and waffles for breakfast, but you might want to skip the cake and ice cream after dinner.

If you’re eating Special K and skim milk for breakfast, only to pig out on Häagen-Dazs at night, you might be fighting your body’s natural metabolism pattern. A new study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggests that we’re built to consume high-fat breakfasts and low-fat dinners.

Scientists fed two groups of mice the same amount of calories each day — but they gave one group a fatty breakfast and a lean dinner, and the other a lean breakfast and a fatty dinner. The mice who had fatty food for breakfast had normal metabolism, but the mice that started their days with low-fat meals and ended them with high-fat meals showed symptoms of metabolic syndrome. The study shows that timing is everything, and that when you eat the food can be as important as how much you eat.

Many Americans eat like the unhealthy mice. They starve themselves in the morning – eating a low-fat muffin, if anything — and end the day with rich, fatty food. But eating fatty food, like eggs and breakfast meat, early in the day and ending the day with veggies and carbohydrates can help fight metabolic syndrome, a health problem afflicting 50 million Americans. Metabolic syndrome, according to the American Heart Association , increases the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. So fry up some eggs tomorro...