Eating habits

Changes in society, new lifestyles and lack of time have resulted in people having increasingly lighter breakfasts and even skipping them. This situation is aggravated if we take into account that they have also adopted a certain tendency to lighten dinners, giving rise to an irrational time distribution of meals with negative repercussions on nutritional status and, therefore, on health. Even regular breakfast eaters have the belief that breakfast is nutritionally unsatisfactory.

Perhaps breakfast is only defined as the first meal of the day. However, this does not mean that it is the least important, this definition does not allow us to perceive the importance it has within the total diet, especially in children and adolescents who are the ones who most often skip this meal.

Skipping breakfast or having a nutritionally incorrect breakfast is associated with lower physical and intellectual performance and with a lower intake of some nutrients, which results in imbalances in the diet because children who do not eat breakfast have greater difficulty in achieving the recommended intakes of energy and nutrients. Besides, establishing such unhealthy habits from childhood will only make it more difficult to correct in adulthood.

Proper nutrition is essential for good health. Breakfast, along with lunch and dinner, is also an important source of energy and nutrients. In fact, it has been proven that a diet without breakfast can hardly be nutritionally correct. Breakfast should provide a quarter of the daily calories and is a good opportunity to include foods that should not be missing in diets: dairy products, fruits and cereals, among others.

Breakfast is more than just having a cup of coffee, since coffee or herbal teas do not provide practically any nutrients. It is necessary to have breakfast every day to achieve a good physical and intellectual performance. The organism needs energy and nutrients for a correct functioning, especially after long hours of fasting after dinner. Breakfast precisely provides the indispensable energy to start the day. In addition, it helps to distribute calories throughout the day and helps to maintain weight, since it avoids a compulsive need to eat at mealtime.

In the stages of maximum growth (childhood and adolescence) breakfast plays a very important role in development. For many people, consuming dairy products (main source of calcium) is associated with breakfast, so that if breakfast is not eaten, the lack of calcium would cause deficiencies that would have repercussions on health (growth alterations, osteoporosis, etc.).

In adults it allows to keep a balanced diet and in the elderly, besides being an appetizing and desired meal, it has the advantage of including foods that are easy to preserve, prepare, chew and digest.

Eating habits: It is said that it is easier for a person to change his religion than his eating habits, and this is because this habit has remained stable for successive generations over long periods of time. Added to this is the fact that we are currently living in a time of great changes that affect the way we eat.

We have already mentioned how important it is for man, in order to maintain his health, to ingest energy and nutrients, and these, at the present stage of evolution, are stored in food.

The different adaptations that man has created throughout his evolution are those that have allowed him to currently use various products. However, he does not consume all the foods available to him because his eating behavior has always been regulated, either by nutritional factors related to survival or by other factors that determine the choice and ultimately eating habits.

So it could be said, in other words, that nutritional needs are the same in all people (excluding individual conditions such as age, sex, physical activity, etc.) but each country, group of people and even each individual meet them according to different eating habits, which marks a boundary between what man needs and can obtain through his instinctive behavior and what man likes or wants to eat.

Eating habits could be defined as: "more or less conscious behavior, collective in most cases and always repetitive that leads people to select, prepare and consume a certain food or menu as part of their social, cultural and religious customs and which is influenced by multiple factors (socioeconomic, cultural, geographical, etc.)".

Mediterranean diet: The Mediterranean diet is considered an example of healthy eating, and was even declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2010.

The first scientific data on this diet date back to 1948, when the epidemiologist Leland g. Allbaugh studied the lifestyle of the inhabitants of the island of Crete. The term became more important when Ancel Keys, from the University of Minnesota, USA, aware of the good health of the inhabitants of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, realized that the frequency of coronary heart disease was lower in that area.

He therefore began his studies on the diet and customs of the people living in that environment in search of a hypothesis that would explain, beyond genetics, the lower number of cardiovascular events and deaths in comparison with the United States.

The initial pillars of his hypothesis were vegetables sprinkled with raw olive oil and wheat bread, since these were the foods most consumed by the inhabitants of Naples (the first population studied).

Later, he established that the relationship between a lower number of cardiovascular events could be due to a diet based on fruits and vegetables, cereals and unrefined grains, legumes, fish, raw nuts such as walnuts and almonds, olive oil and wine accompanying meals, cooked in a healthy way. All this together with a regular physical activity, which at that time was due to the dedication of the population to agriculture.