SE5 - The Importance of Cheerios

The Importance of Cheerios

            I personally love breakfast.  The thought of juicy bacon and eggs with a grapefruit on the side is absolutely mouth-watering to me.  Throughout my high school career, I made breakfast a priority.  I always wound up being the first person I knew to be awake every morning because I would leave myself at least an hour and a half to shower, eat breakfast, and then get to school.  I even would be late for school if it meant not having to compromise my coveted breakfast hours.  Kids called me crazy, asking why I didn’t just sleep in or get to class on time and then eat a lot at lunch.  When you woke up today were you late for school?  If so, this could have prompted you to skip breakfast and rush out the door, however, thanks to a study conducted by students at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1996-1999, I have accredited research to say that this may not be the smartest idea. 

            Their study was preformed to observe the same group of individual adolescents over three years.  They asked each participant each year how often they ate breakfast, how well they did in school, and how much exercise they got.  What they found was very interesting to me.  The overarching conclusion to their expansive study was that adolescents who generally ate breakfast every day happened to have a much more healthy BMI (body mass index, calculated from weight and height) than those who frequently skipped breakfast.  As it turns out, adolescents who were eating breakfast every day also had more energy throughout the day, enabling them to participate in getting more exercise, doing more schoolwork effectively, and using less of their time playing video games and computer games.  The students who were of a healthy weight at the start of the study, and each year reported frequently skipping breakfast actually became more overweight as the years went on.  They also reported less physical exercise and as a whole reported having more trouble with their school work.  Sounds like breakfast may be more important than even I anticipated. 

            So what should most people take away from this?  Well, although this study was done only on adolescents, research indicates that both behavioral patterns and weight patterns that occur in adolescent years are known to carry over into adult life and hold true for most adults as well.  The study states as a way of justifying their own research, that although it wasn’t their research that concluded this, that teen eating habits and the consequences of those eating habits are likely to remain prominent throughout adulthood as well. 

            Some people don’t eat breakfast because they say they don’t have time.  I say no way.  I can eat a bowl of cereal with milk in three minutes flat.  Even though a bowl of cereal may not look like much, “cereal intake (hot and cold, per calorie and per cost) may provide a healthy breakfast.” (Niklas)  So stop telling yourself you don’t have time for breakfast.  Make time.  Breakfast food is delicious, relatively healthy, and can give you that boost of energy you’re looking for when you stop at Starbucks and fill yourself with the artificial energy that we call caffeine.  I never miss breakfast no matter what, and I have never once felt like I needed a cup of coffee.  Instead, I do fairly frequently wake up feeling starving and sluggish until I get at least my daily fix of cereal.

Berkley, CS, HRH Rockett, MW Gillman, AE Field, and GA Colditz. "Longitudinal Study of Skipping Breakfast and Weight Change in Adolescents." International Journal of Obesity 27 (2003): 1258-266. Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group. Web. 14 May 2013. <http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v27/n10/full/0802402a.html>.

Nicklas TA, McQuarrie A, Fastnaught C, O’Neil CE. Efficiency of breakfast consumption patterns of ninth graders: nutrient-to-cost comparisons. J Am Diet Assoc 2002; 102: 226–233.