Your pancake breakfast could be making you cranky

Image | Pancakes

Caption: Is your breakfast making you cranky? Cut back on carbs. (IrishFireside/Wikimedia Commons)

What did you have for breakfast this morning? Are you a grab-a-muffin-and-go kind of person? Or maybe you prefer a heartier, protein heavy breakfast? You know … eggs and bacon with a slice of whole-grain toast?
Well, it turns out, that decision could matter for more than your waistline. According to the senior author of a new study(external link), Dr. So Young Park(external link) from the University of Lü​beck says what you eat could influence decisions you make.
She and her colleagues found that when people ate carbohydrate-heavy breakfast, they were much more likely to punish a person for making an unfair offer in a pscyhological game known as the Ultimatum Game. The reason for this? If you eat a breakfast that's higher in protein, you make more tyrosine, which is a precurser to dopamine — a neurotransmitter in the brain that affects decisions we make.

Media Video | Quirks and Quarks : How your breakfast could be influencing the decisions you make

Caption:

Open Full Embed in New Tab (external link)Loading external pages may require significantly more data usage.