For years you've been assured that "life begins at forty." And so it does—if your middle years are protected from the serious ailments that often sneak in with the fortieth birth­day. But I doubt if you've given much thought to the fact that youth begins at breakfast.

I consider breakfast the most important meal of the day. For me it is always a high-protein meal, with little or no pure starch of any kind. Nor is this merely a whim of mine. There's a solid nutritional basis for eating high-protein breakfasts, and eliminating the pure starches from your "wake-up" meal.

My breakfast menu sometimes causes comment among my fellow breakfasters whenever I am away from home. I remem­ber one morning in the dining room of a Pittsburgh hotel when I ordered sliced oranges, two broiled lamb chops, and a cube of cheese for my breakfast. The waitress repeated the order as though I had ordered hummingbird tongues, then set off doubtfully toward the kitchen.

At that particular time I was just beginning a series of difficult lectures, all the while trying to rush to completion the manuscript of one of my earlier books. I needed all the energy I could muster—and I knew that each day's energy is supplied primarily at breakfast.

But the weary-looking couple at the table next to mine evidently didn't agree with my choice of breakfast. For, as the waitress placed the platter of nicely browned chops in front of me, I heard the woman murmur to her husband, "Disgusting! A regular cannibal's breakfast." And then she and her husband smugly downed their own all-starch break fast of d patented dry cereal, sweet roll and coffee. Yet I'll wager that around eleven o'clock that morning I had by far the most energetic body, and the best-controlled nerves of the three. And all because I had the foresight to supply my mind and body with the type of food—high-protein—that assures the most nourishment for muscles, nerves and brain cells.

Although you may not have realized it, your disposition— your "mood," that is—for the day is largely determined by the kind of breakfast you eat. A high-starch breakfast starts you out for the day with your appetite temporarily appeased, yet with your digestive tract laboring under the burden of a lot of gooey food that probably will have you belching before you leave the table. As the gas from this undigested starchy mass accumulates in your digestive tract, crowding uncom­fortably around your heart, you begin feeling as though you shouldn't have gotten out of bed at all that morning. Your night's rest apparently did you little good, for you are tired and weary even before the morning gets well under way.

And how sensitive you are on days like this! The least little upset is likely to make you either want to cry, or swear. Because your own nerves are "on edge," you'll probably end up by offending someone else. Nobody loves you, you're getting old and touchy, the world is against you and so on, until you end up actually looking older because of the dreary thoughts you've been harboring. Yet all your fancied woes had their roots in the fact that you didn't eat the right kind of breakfast!

Show me where the average high-starch breakfast of fruit juice, white toast, devitalized cereal and white-sugared coffee contains any thiamin to feed hard-working nerves and brain cells, and I'll be glad to give up my own high-protein, thiamin-containing breakfasts of meat, eggs, fish, cheese and seed cereals. But, until such proof is forthcoming (and I'm safe in making this offer, because "proof" of this erroneous nutritional fact can never be made), I shall continue eating the highly proteinized breakfasts that I know are teeming with the energy I shall require to perform each day's tasks to the best of my ability—to say nothing of fortifying me against succumbing to the irritations of the hundred and one little things that, constantly arise to try one's patience.

Day after day of breakfasts low in high-protein and thiamin-rich foods are responsible for more than half the supersensi-tive, depressed, quarrelsome, non-cooperative people in this country. And I hesitate to estimate how much domestic unhappiness traces back to breakfasts that fail to prepare bodies and minds for the give-and-take of everyday living in our nerve-trying era.

Most high-protein foods are rich in thiamin, particularly egg yolk, lean beef and lamb, and seed cereals such as millet and sunflower seed. A splendid energy breakfast is one con­sisting of fruit (whole or sliced citrus fruits, not the juice alone, melon, berries, pineapple or other fresh or sun-dried fruits), scrambled eggs to which dry skim milk powder and grated cheese have been added for flavor and extra protein, served with hot millet meal mush cooked in liquid milk made from the powdered milk and served with butter and honey.

A light breakfast of fruit juice, toast and coffee is not sufficient nourishment to carry the hungry body (remember, you've not eaten for nearly twelve hours when you sit down to the breakfast table) through a morning's work with full vigor and efficiency. The word breakfast means exactly that —"break the fast."

The business of skipping breakfast entirely is an extremely foolish habit for anyone, but more particularly so for the person who wants to encourage his body to remain youthfully strong and vigorous. Many women—men, too—entertain the false idea that by skipping breakfast they will "lose weight." This reminds me of the nearing-forty wife of a friend of mine. A devotee of the "I must diet" cult, she religiously skips her breakfast every morning, momentarily quieting her Tumbling stomach with several cups of strong black coffee and a cigarette or two. But along about ten o'clock she is forced to succumb to those persistent hunger pangs which were not appeased by the black-coffee-and-cigarette breakfast. One or two white-bread sandwiches are washed down, either by a soft drink from the refrigerator or by more coffee, and topped off by a wedge of pie or a slice of cake left over from a previous meal. She reconciles herself to the number of calories in this high-starch snack with the thought that she "saved a lot of calories" by not eating breakfast.

I need not explain that this haphazard dieter does not lose weight. Nor do I need to tell you that she is a highly nervous, often unreasonable woman who looks at least a good five years more than her real age—and who stands a good chance of seeing her home broken up unless she does something to calm her nerves.

A series of studies undertaken at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and reported not long ago in the Jour­nal of the American Dietetic Association, brought out some startling facts about breakfast-skippers that caused the doctors making the study to issue this warning: Not eating breakfast is both unwise and harmful.

The women volunteers, who did without their breakfasts for the purposes of this dietetic survey, showed a marked drop in their working efficiency. Their reactions were decidedly slowed down. And a marked increase was noted in their neuro-muscular tremors. This means that they could not work as well, or as untiringly; they were more likely to meet with accidents because of their slowed-down reactions, and their nervous and muscular control fell way below normal.

The men taking part in this experiment showed the same harmful effects, only more so. They complained more about being hungry, and experienced greater fatigue after a strenuous exercise. A few of the men even complained of dizziness and nausea.

I hope that the unthinking wives who send their husbands out to work each morning without breakfast, or with a hastily thrown together affair of coffee, toast and dry cereal, will ponder awhile on the foregoing paragraph. If your husband is showing signs of "slipping," might not the cause lie in your own failure to send him forth nutritionally well pre­pared each morning for that day's physical and mental strains?

Such wives might also give thought to the fact that the same kind of inadequate breakfasts which age their husbands also cause the years to be unkind to them. It's very pleasant, I realize, to lie in bed until the very last minute, and then make a dash for the kitchen, set the coffee perking, throw a couple slices of white bread (already sliced for you) into the automatic toaster, and pour some dry cereal from the package into a bowl at each place. But the time "saved" by such nutri­tionally unsafe breakfasts is piling up for you and for your family—piling up in the unwanted premature aging that is lurking around the corner to overtake you along about the fortieth birthday. Or to hasten a natural advance in years into a crippled senility.

Everyone, no matter what their present age, needs the irreplaceable nutrition provided by a high-protein breakfast for a body that has been fasting all night long.

If you can afford meat only once a day, I would be inclined to advise you to enjoy this splendid high-protein food at breakfast—a leisurely breakfast that you've given yourself time enough to eat in comfort by arising an hour earlier than usual.

A typical breakfast in the Argentine is simply a piece of pan-broiled steak served with an egg—either poached or lightly cooked in butter or oil (olive or sunflower seed). I discovered that this is the favorite breakfast or luncheon dish of the hardy Argentine working man and woman in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario. And I might add that it has become one of my favorites, too—a dish that followed me home to be added to our list of high-protein breakfast dishes.

A high-protein breakfast may be a radical departure from your present eating habits. But you must remember one thing: Your day can be no better than the foundation laid for that day. And your breakfast is the nutritional foundation you lay each morning for the activities of the next twelve to sixteen hours. If you lack pep, are always just one step ahead of collapsing into a chair, and never can quite get around to finishing your work, change to a high-protein breakfast. You'll amaze yourself by how quickly you begin perking up.

Here are a few general suggestions. (Breakfast menus and recipes are given in Part II.) First, take your time while eat­ing breakfast, even if it means getting up thirty minutes or an hour earlier. You cannot get the maximum good out of your breakfast, or any meal for that matter, if your mind is racing away from the table. Relax, enjoy your food and let your stomach have at least half an hour for full concentration on its job before you go dashing off on the day's round of activities.

Eat all the fresh fruit you want at breakfast, preferably the whole fruit. Fruit is a pleasant food with which to begin any meal, and is an excellent way of preparing the stomach for the other food to follow. Drink whatever beverage you like —only don't dump the contents of the sugar bowl into it. If you like your morning cup of coffee or tea sweetened, for a real energy beverage try honey instead of white sugar. The spoonful or so of honey you use will, in itself, be a splendid energizer. But whatever fruit, beverage, or high-protein dish you choose for breakfast, no pure-starch foods. No white-bread toast, no sweet rolls, no devitalized cereals. (And don't be tempted into sneaking a piece of toast or a roll merely because no one is looking. Someone is watching you—the vision of the youthful person you want to be.)

The worst breakfast-time sinner of all is the person who takes only a cup of black coffee. He commits the unforgiv­able sin of stimulating his body while denying it the nour­ishment demanded by such stimulation.

You cannot expect a hasty, ill-planned breakfast and a quick, equally protein-deficient lunch to keep your body fueled and energized throughout the very hours of the day when you put the greatest strain on your nerves, brain cells and muscles.

This habit of saving up all day for a heavy meal at night is what puts the ''spare tire" around the waistline. Experi­ments conducted at the University of Chicago have disclosed that the food eaten at an evening dinner is transformed mainly into fat, and not into useful energy. Because you go to bed shortly after that heavy evening meal, your body does not require the energy it does throughout your long waking hours. And for that reason the food consumed at this late meal is stored rather than burned. Stored, I must warn you, as fat deposits in the liver, around the heart and in the arteries.

This explains why I teach that your breakfasts and lunches should be full meals, not stop-gap, hastily snatched snacks. And your evening meal should be a light one—although nu­tritious—so that the unburned energy foods eaten at that later hour are not allowed to store up overnight as unwanted fat around the waistline, or in that most dangerous of all places, the arteries.

Proteinize your breakfasts and lunches for energy without stuffiness. Smaller amounts of food, if that food is high-protein, satisfy the appetite without the bulk of a carbohy­drate meal necessary to quiet hunger pangs.

I guarantee you that a breakfast, say, of two scrambled eggs (boiled, poached, coddled or shirred are equally nutritious), a cube of cheese or a portion of cottage cheese, plus whatever fruit and beverage you prefer, will leave you far more satis­fied, with absolutely no sense of being stuffed, than if you had eaten enough of a high-starch breakfast to satisfy your hunger.

Now about your lunch—instead of spaghetti, baked mac­aroni, or a sandwich and a piece of pie, fortify your mind and body for the balance of its day's work by choosing a dish containing another high-protein food—meat, fish, poultry, cheese or a good meat substitute made from whole seed cereals as explained in Part II. Add to this a vegetable or a green salad, top it off with a light fruit or custard dessert, and you have the perfect, pep-supplying luncheon.

What's more, by the time evening comes, you'll find that your appetite isn't so ravenous that it demands the accus­tomed heavy dinner. Another light protein-vegetable-and-fruit meal will be all your appetite demands; and most cer­tainly you'll sleep far better, and wake up the next morning more refreshed than if your body had struggled all night through the digestion of a heavy, high-starch dinner.

You'll probably feel—and look—younger with each in­creasing day of these light, proteinized breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Your figure will become trimmer, your muscles firmer, your step lighter, your working capacity greater and your vigor more pronounced.

The time to begin dealing knockout punches to a pre­mature old age is at breakfast

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