Challenge the Dogma: Should kids eat breakfast?

Here’s what we’re told about our kids. Skipping breakfast could lead them to overeat at later meals, and eventually pack on extra pounds. 

(please forward this to a parent of school-aged kids) 

Does this even make sense?
It sounds like someone’s selling the “spending to save” idea, but for kids!! In this way of thinking, kids need to eat more now, so they won’t eat more later. But this is THEORY, and no one has actually looked to see if this is true. 
Tanja Kral of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, however, did just this, and the results are published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Here’s the link to the research.


Here’s what they did
They saw a large group of kids twice each day. In the morning, they had them either A) eat a breakfast; or B) not eat a breakfast. Whether they happened to eat breakfast that time changed each day. 


Next, the kids came back for lunch every day, and were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. This allowed the researchers to see whether skipping breakfast actually made them eat more later on at lunch. Great study. Simple. 


Here’s what they found
Not surprisingly, kids said they felt hungrier throughout the morning when they did not eat breakfast. However, that did not translate into larger lunches.


“We found that despite differences in feelings of hunger and fullness, children who regularly consume breakfast did not make up for the missing calories from a skipped breakfast on a single occasion by eating more later in the day,” said Kral.


As a result, the kids who ate breakfast ended up consuming more calories overall, and more than they needed to maintain their current weights. The average kid took in 362 more calories on days when they did eat breakfast, pushing them about 20 percent over their estimated daily energy requirement.


Bottom line
The reasons for kids to eat breakfast have as much to do with their ability to concentrate and focus as anything. But the notion that they MUST eat to prevent more eating later in the afternoon is wrong. 


So, should your child eat breakfast, or not? 
This isn’t an easy question to answer precisely because the needs of every child is different (who is surprised by this, really?), and you can’t apply a one-size-fits-all solution to it. 


Kids who eat breakfast — on average — do better academically than kids — on average — who don’t. That, we do know. So, again, there is no easy answer here, but maybe there’s a middle ground: have a little breakfast (of real food). Just lose the sense that more is better because, in this case, more is just more. 

For more information: Click here to visit Will Clower’s website.