Eating ice cream for breakfast seems like a ridiculous idea. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Nutritionists advise that the right kind and right amount of food should be consumed during breakfast to boost your energy. Now, a scientist in Japan claims that eating ice cream for breakfast helps you become smarter and more alert!
Professor Yoshihiko Koga is doing a series of clinical trials that requires test subjects to immediately eat ice cream upon waking up at Tokyo's Kyorin University. The test subjects are then put through mental exercises on a computer and monitors the brain's activities.
A Japanese news site reports that the group that is eating ice cream for breakfast exhibited faster reaction time and better mental processing capabilities compared to the group that has not eaten ice cream for breakfast.
Eating ice cream for breakfast resulted in an increase of high-frequency alpha waves. High-frequency alpha waves are linked to one's level of alertness and mental irritation. It means that a person is more alert and less prone to mental irritation whether the individual has a high amount of high-frequency alpha waves.
To test whether the consumption of low-temperature food simply shocked the subjects' brains causing a high level of alertness, Professor Koga repeated his trials by using cold water instead of ice cream.
The series of experiments with the consumption of cold water upon waking up also resulted in a high degree of alertness and mental capacity but remarkably lower compared to the results of the subjects who ate ice cream for breakfast.
There is still no accurate explanation on why eating ice cream for breakfast resulted in high levels of alertness and mental capacity. Professor Koga wishes to continue his research on the topic and is looking into the possibility that the ingredients used to make ice cream and that eating ice cream triggers positive emotion also results in a high level of alertness and mental capacity.
Nutritionists are skeptical with Professor Koga's research. Are the psychological benefits of eating ice cream for breakfast outweigh the possible health effects on the person? What are the long-term effects of eating ice cream for breakfast? Further research should be done to answer these questions. But for now, people are jumping on eating ice cream for breakfast not for its mental benefits but merely for an excuse to eat ice cream for breakfast.
