Is Breakfast Essential for your Children?

The meal eaten in the morning is globally considered as ‘Breakfast’. The word means breaking the fasting period of the last night. Every part of the world has its own breakfast Menu depending upon the availability of food resources, so, a very wide range of preparations and ingredients are now associated with breakfast.

This morning meal is essential for the human body for elevating concentration, preventing malnutrition and acts as a source of energy that will be used for daily activities. It has been seen that some youngsters skip breakfast for numerous reasons like not having enough time to eat breakfast, not feeling hungry and lack of knowledge of the breakfast importance.

Previous studies indicated that frequently skipping breakfast creating obesity in the youngsters because they eat more in the lunch and throughout the day to overcome the deficiency of breakfast. This habit of skipping breakfast causes several changes in the body’s metabolism and has a direct relationship with diet, glucose levels and insulin while these three factors become augmented in people with the habit of avoiding breakfast.

Breakfast is an essential meal for the children in order to maintain the nutritional stability. Mostly children copy their parents who do not eat breakfast since this lifestyle habit is often inherited. Nutritional knowledge is a key aspect to understand the importance of breakfast for the parents and it’s their responsibility to educate the children reading this issue. Several factors effect the regular breakfast consumption in the children. Limited information is available about the effect of breakfast on the children to maintain their nutritional requirement.  

A research published in Pakistan Journal of Nutrition by Dina Keumala Sari and Marianne to access the impact of consuming breakfast for 6 days on the nutritional status and awareness of breakfast among junior high school students.

They further access the factors that play a role in the breakfast habits of school children so that these factors can be used to prevent malnutrition in children. They found that regular breakfast have no impact on nutritional status; conversely, knowledge of the importance of breakfast was related with regular breakfast habits.

The researchers claimed that Breakfast was not the main factor contributing to adolescent nutritional status and other possible factors include total nutritional intake and physical activity. They researches informed about the limitation of this study is the short treatment time period (6 days) of the research while further research attempts are recommended to access the long-term impact of breakfast skipping on the children.