The Breakfast of Champions is: Breakfast!

For years, I've nagged dieting friends and family not to skip breakfast. When they demand to know why, I explain that they need to get blood sugar up after a night without food (thus, breaking the fast) and that skipping this important meal causes the body to crave more food later.

And then they ignore me.

Well, next time the subject pops up, I get to add hard science to my nagging tool box. Recently, a team from the Imperial College in London hooked breakfast eaters and non-breakfast eaters up to an MRI machine and showed them images of high-calorie food like pizza and cake, as well as low-calorie food like fish and veggies. The pleasure-centers in the non-breakfast eaters' brains went nuts for the high calorie food.

In other words, if you skip breakfast, your body is more inclined to crave junk food.

From WebMD:

"Our results support the advice for eating a healthy breakfast as part of the dietary prevention and treatment of obesity," Tony Goldstone, MD, PhD, a consultant endocrinologist with the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London, says in a statement. "When people skip meals, especially breakfast, changes in brain activity in response to food may hinder weight loss and even promote weight gain."

So next time someone refuses to eat their Wheaties, I'm taking them to get an MRI. Does anyone know where I can get a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine cheap? The only one I could find on eBay was $545,000 and that's a little outside of my price range -- although it did have free shipping...