I skipped over some arguments for breakfast, both specific and general, in my most recent leftovers post that I thought I would examine in closer detail today.
First, one appealing aspect about the possible relationship between breakfast and jet lag is how although exposure to sunlight is a widely accepted factor in a regular sleep cycle, it seems to be insufficient in helping a traveler reset after crossing time zones. Outside of the broad categories of food and sunlight, there isn’t much that qualifies in terms of what enters the body, so if I felt that inputs mattered in the way the body functioned and it seemed that sunlight had little immediate effect on jetlag, then logically speaking the food I ate must have mattered a lot more.
A second thought I had about this relationship was how travelers in the Boston area often talk about how much easier they find it to fly west than east – at least in the context of avoiding jetlag. I thought this rule seemed arbitrary at best so I considered how the theory about breakfast and jetlag fit into this observation. I realized the key was how most seem to find it easier to wait a little while to eat versus forcing themselves to eat before ready (most diners will wait for a table at a restaurant, for example, while ‘not hungry’ is the most common reason I hear when someone refused to continue eating). Travelers who maintain a time-driven eating schedule while out west eat a little later compared to the local time of their home cities; when travelers go east, the same logic is reversed as people eat earlier compared to when they would eat back home. If the body does associate breakfast with wakeup, the experiences outlined by travelers supports the concept so long as you believe that people find it easier to stay in bed an extra hour until local breakfast time than they do rising before the early bird for that omelet and hash.
The third and final thought is a simple observation – it seems to me that most early risers who get out of bed each morning without apparent difficulty are the same zealots who talk about the importance of breakfast. Do they rise early because of breakfast or do they breakfast because they rose early? Like the chicken that lays those eventually scrambled eggs, I suppose at some point acknowledging that one comes from the other is enough – I’ll leave the details to the scientists, those brave men and women whose burdens of proof are a little more rigorous than my own standard of recalling what I did on a Thursday, once, and writing about it on this all-knowing space.
