Break for Breakfast
When I was little, breakfast was also an important meal. That was because my mom made it for me. As I got older and began to wake up earlier than she did (three cheers for high school), I stopped eating breakfast. I didn’t have time to make it and quite frankly I’d rather sleep for 5 extra minutes than eat. Was this a good choice? In recent years, as obesity rates have increased and society began to crack down on unhealthy lifestyles, breakfast has become a pretty big deal. This lead me to wonder if breakfast was actually important.
It seems that breakfast is very important. The health benefits of breakfast outshine the health benefits of my extra five minutes of snoozing. According to the Huffington Post, eating breakfast can: increase energy, decrease weight, speed up your metabolism, and improve memory and cholesterol levels. This article and this article and this article also have their share of health benefits from eating breakfast. Elle Paula with Demand Media had the most intriguing article to me. It appealed to students only, and the benefits we receive from eating breakfast. Which made me wonder if eating breakfast could improve my grades? The research seems to be on board with this.
A study in “the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine” shows that schools that participate in a breakfast program have higher student performances overall. A quote from the study states, “[s]tudents who increased their participation in the school breakfast program had significantly greater increases in their math grades and significantly greater decreases in the rates of school absence and tardiness than children whose participation remained the same or decreased.” This implies that breakfast does help school participation and performance.
The study looked at 3 schools and 1627 students. 62% of that group rarely ate school-supplied breakfast, and 15% ate the school-supplied breakfast everyday. The study does not rule out reverse causation, which would be that smarter children eat school-supplied breakfast. It also does not rule out third variables, if the children are just simply smarter to begin with. The study also only looked at math (logical, right-brain) functioning and not abstract, or creative, left-brain functioning. Is this implying that eating breakfast only benefits right-brain functionality? The study was not well-designed and until there is further research in the topic we cannot conclude that eating breakfast increasing productivity in school; however, you should still eat it because it tastes good.
This post was very interesting and enjoyable to read. I notice a significant difference on days when I eat breakfast as opposed to the days that I don’t have time or simply decide not to. I also find it amazing how eating a balanced breakfast has been shown to improve energy levels as well as memory. This article further explores how taking steps such as eating a balanced breakfast can have an impact on mood: http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/how-food-affects-your-moods?page=2
I agree that this study is of utmost importance. Personally everyday throughout High School I woke up early in order to make myself an omelet. This would fuel me for the day and I know from personal experience that the days I missed were without a doubt my worst days in school. My memory was lacking, my focus was off, and my mood was miserable. The link below shows that skipping breakfast does impair learning ability. I think this is a big deal because grabbing a quick breakfast is so easy and so helpful. Without it your protein intake is already low for the day and it can lead to a whole other range of health problems.http://frac.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/breakfastforlearning.pdf
I would agree that this study wasn’t conducted well enough to produce correlation. Although the variety of schools and amount of students make the results seem justified there are many other variables they ignored. One that I found most noticeable was that students may not eat the school provided breakfast, but still eat before coming to school. They would fall into the category that did not eat and possibly skew the data, when in fact they actually did have breakfast. In addition I would agree that natural ability of students could be a huge factor. In order to remove these variables I think an experiment would have to be conducted before a correlation can be distinguished. Besides having benefits for learning eating breakfast can also help reduce the chances of obesity by wakening your metabolism
Here is an article about all the benefits on eating breakfast, including school improvement among other things.
http://www.healthychildren.org/English/healthy-living/nutrition/Pages/The-Case-for-Eating-Breakfast.aspx
I did one of my blogs about this last blog period and after doing my research, I was convinced that breakfast can be helpful for many health reasons. I personally do feel better after eating breakfast because I can focus on my school work instead of thinking about lunch time. But, I also did not find well designed studies to really prove that eating breakfast can be beneficial. I think if researchers could perform a well designed study, we might get our answer some day.